A couple of years ago I installed DoctorLED
(http://www.doctorled.com/p24.htm) Mars Dome interior lights throughout
BlueJacket. This was the first shipment of these to the US and I literally
had to wait for them to get off of the container and into my hands before I
could depart for the NW Caribbean. They may have changed the design since
then, but this is what I've got.

Anyhow, about a year later I realized that they were getting dimmer and
dimmer and recently took a failed unit over to a friend who's an excellent
electronics engineer to determine what had failed. He found 2 problems with
the units:

1) There's a layer of thermal paste which is supposed to conduct the heat
between the circuit board that the LEDs are mounted on and the aluminum
backing plate which also functions as a heat sink. For all intents and
purposes, there was too little paste to provide contact between the two.
However, after running a working unit for about 10 minutes, there was no
appreciable heat buildup, so we don't suspect that my problem was due to
thermal overheating.

2) The basic design of the circuit is a transistor which limits the voltage
to 9V to 2 parallel stacks of 3 LEDs in series. This provides 3 V to each
LED, which is just fine. However, the transistor is too slow to handle fast
transient voltage spikes, and there's no voltage dump circuitry on the
boards to handle this. A spike probably occurred somewhere along the line
and fried some of the LEDs.

DoctorLED will sell me replacement circuit boards at about 1/2 of the cost
of the whole unit, which is still expensive. I plan to do that, but I want
to protect against this happening in the future. All of the lighting is on
2 separate circuits. What can I do to protect against this happening again?
I was thinking about a 12 V DC to DC power supply. Any suggestions?


-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org