No pictures today, but plenty of frustration.
I was finishing the wiring of the engine house outside lighting. I got all the wires tied together and onto a junction block which in turn tied into the mains. When I tested the circuit, only one out of three lights lit. Prior to this, I had one failed and individual test and I traced it to a bad driver chip. I am out of them (ordered more from Amazon last night) and installed a single 470 ohm resistor to limit the 12 VDC to 20 ma. When I did the total circuit test, the only one that was lit was the one with the resistor. The other two drivers seemed to have failed also. I cut their chips out and replaced them with resistors and then the one with the resistor stopped working while these two fixed ones worked. (Are you following any of this?) I bypassed the resistor and used my protected test circuit on the bare light leads coming from the fixture, and it didn't work. I needed to pull the entire fixture since the LED probably needed changing. Of course, I had reinforced the fixture bases with CA since the urethane glue wasn't holding. To get it out I had to destroy the base. So new bases are waiting for me tomorrow since I was able to just grow some more, but it was very annoying. I knew the minute I put the cable ties on everything something would stop working. Why did I lose all these drivers? I'm not sure… I think they're sensitive to heat and I may have overheated them in soldering or when shrinking the insulation on them. Either way, they failed. The side light continues to function well and I was using it as my reference test. I never had so much trouble with the surface mount LEDs. The refinery has over a dozen of them. The distillery has 5, Nighthawks has 4 and Woodbourne Gallery has 6.
