IR floodlights off of Landscape Lighting

So I bought a Dahua POE PTZ camera off eBay. Great camera and I'm happy with it, but it has no built in IR lights. That's a problem at night. It has much better IR sensitivity than my Hikvisions, but just not good enough.

Installing an IR flood light is easy to do. Just buy one off eBay and plug it in. But I didn't want to run extra wires and I didn't want to take up another outlet (or use a powerstrip) in my garage.

I already have some landscape lighting installed with a way overpowered power box running them since I installed LED lights recently. So I set out to run my IR floodlights off of my lanscape lighting.

This proved to be not challenging at all. You just need the right parts.

• Infrared LED flood lights
• Full bridge rectifier (best to get one with a heatsink)
• A standard lanscape lighting tap
• Various plugs and wires

The rectifier I got is a 50 amp 1000 volt one with a heatsink off of eBay for $2 with free shipping. I already happened to have some plugs that fit the terminals on it.

The lanscape lighting tap is meant to run another similar landscape cable to another part of the path/area. Or to actually tap in a light. It uses sharp prings to dig in to the cable you are connecting to, and the new cable. These work well and provide a reasonably water proofed connection. Available at pretty much anywhere that sells landscape lighting (got mine at Lowes).

So forst install a short wire to the new tap part on the tap. I used speaker wire since I didn't have any more lanscape wire to use. Then added terminals.

Then you just hook up the terminals from the tap to the AC sides of the rectifier. And hook up your cable going to the IR lights to the positive and negative sides (be sure to check and verify this before installing).

This is a temporary place to put this set up while I work on maybe designing a 3D printed enclosure for it all.

Now I can power 2 LED IR floodlights for my camera using my already installed landscape lighting that runs on 12 volts AC.

Lighting Saber

No not a light saber, a lighting saber. I needed a light above my computer desk that gave decent, broad light for when I work on projects and take pictures. So I decided to use my 3 monitor set up to my advantage. Essentially it's just a light bar that has a dimmer and is moveable.

Materials needed:
PWM dimmer (generic one that can be found all ober the place)
LED light strip (also all over the place)
8 M3 16mm bolt/nuts
A drill
3d Printed part from HERE
1/4 inch slotted aluminum bar (says for plywood)
A 12 volt power supply


So the hardest part for this is probably getting a good 3D print and mounting those parts. All you do is print them, drill some holes, and put in the bolts like so.

After that, mount the PWM dimmer and the light stip to the bottom of the aluminum bar. The length can be easily cut to size. You may want to add additional glue to the ends and the middle to prevent the double sided tape it comes with from releasing.

Then just plug in the wires and wave around your saber. Or lean it somewhere or whatever. You get some good light now.

Remote IR Signals

I'm looking in to possibly reverse engineering remotes so I can reproduce signals with an Arduino. It would be pretty cool to do this in an automated fashion but that may be a lot more work than it's worth. Plus I need to look in to getting an IR receiver. Anyways, having an Oscilloscope is nice to see these types of things.

"UP" Arrow Key

"DOWN" Arrow Key

A Difference In Frequencies Between The Screenshots

My bendy desk lamp

I kept needing a lamp at work. One that was small and could be dimmable. I gathered some extra parts I had lying around and threw this thing together. Puts off some good light and has the added benefit of being bendable. 

It just uses a generic 12 volt wall wart, a cheap COB led, an eBay dimmer PWM module, and a big power resistor. 

Cheap Flashlight Teardown

Chances are, if you've searched for an led flashlight online then you have run across one of these cheap lights.

These lights are very cheap, take a single AA battery, but surprisingly they work very well. I have many of these around my house for when the power goes out. They are small, focusable, great battery life, and put off a good amount of light. For the price, I have nothing bad to say about these lights and I recommend buying them.


But here's a simple teardown of one.


First off, here's the light in all it's glory. Measuring 94mm at it's length and 26mm at its thickest point.

The button at the back is a simple on/off click button. The light itself has 3 different modes. A high, low, and flashing setting. Clicking the light on and off or pushing the button part way allows you to switch between modes.

You can unscrew a ring on the front and remove an O-ring and lens.

You can see in the above photo there are two opposing notches in the silver part of the reflector towards the outside. But using my caliper I was I able to insert the caliper edges in to those slots and unscrew the unit from its housing on the main body.

I wasn't too sure where to go from here and thought maybe the led unit was all glued together. But then I kept messing around with it and was able to remove that plastic ring and reflector bit. This then exposed the led module. The led is a Cree XR-E or XR-C (probably the lower model XR-C) from what I could look up. There's not any specific model identifying information but it does look like one of those two models. Cree makes a good led so this is nice. From my testing, this led seems to be the best at 3 volts and 400 ma current draw.

Now when I removed the led, I noticed some circuitry behind it. This wasn't what I was expecting to see there. I figured the led was going to be the only thing at the front and the circuitry was going to be in that clicky switch in the back. Nope, all the circuitry and driver was right behind the led.

And that's that. Overall these are great little lights for the price.