OK, so this is somewhat related to flashlights.
Last Christmas, my Mother-in-law gifted two of these stuffed animal lights to my two oldest daughters (4 and 2). This one belongs to my two year old
From the beginning, the operation of this “light” was kind of erratic. It was supposed to turn on after two short presses, off with one press, or turn off automatically after a period of time being left on. While my older daughters toy functioned properly (and still does) this one often required pressing the button a half dozen times or more to get it to light, eventually failing to function entirely. Seeing as my interest in electronics had be reignited recently, partly due to this site, I pulled it apart to see what I could do.
Well, not much interesting here (I’ll get to the purple board shortly). As far as I could tell it appeared to be getting power to the proper places and the “rubber membrane” switch (removed from board before photo) was working. I could not find any signals on the driver, so I am assuming that the controller, which is sealed over, is to blame.
Back to the purple OSHPark board. I decided if I could not get the original driver to work, why not make my own? While I have had electronics experience in the past, and even worked in a PCB assembly shop for a short time, I had never designed my own board until coming across BLF. Another BLF learned skill used is the programming used to run the new driver. I had played around with PIC controllers back in college, but working with Atmel brand is another new skill picked up here. I decided to use the Star momentary program, trimmed of unneeded things such as voltage monitoring and dual PWM, and adding a shut down timer.
I am unsure what LEDs are used, but I guess that they probably run around 20mA each. As there are 5 in parallel I setup the driver to run at 100mA. A small mosfet on the lower side of the circuit provides dimming by the PWM signal from the controller.
I ended up using a different switch, the height of which caused me to slightly modify the housing of the driver for proper function.
I found the project to be both interesting and educational. I thought that someone else may find interest in this amateurs tinkering as well