Cheap Chinese LED-lamp teardown and review.

[ResR]

First thing I noticed was the assembly complexity in this light bulb, for the cost of only 4 euros, it looked oddly complicated. There's a metal face plate hold with tiny screws, it hold three lenses in place, also the aluminium part of case was held to plastic base also tiny screws. One thing about screws is that the smaller it gets, the more time it takes to assemble with it. LED's were hand soldered. There was a lot of parts that could be press fitted and glued together. Small power supply has half bridge rectifier, no mains fuse, 13001 transistor, bottom of the pcb the pins are sanded almost against the pcb (sandpapered, not cut, with almost all the solder gone), it ain't gonna be plugged in. I like the use of thermal grease between LED PCB and aluminium case, at least that was made right. Maybe the manual labour is cheaper than pick and place machine? Now I have 3 1W power leds to play with.

[SeanB]

The ones I buy here screw together, and have a lot better construction quality, though of course the heatsink is always going to be very much on the too small size so they fail fast.  Quite a few I buy just for the LED puck and the driver, and install them with a better heatsink so that they work well. The drivers are pretty good.

[ResR]

I buied this one to take apart and use the LED's for the solar rechargeable flashlight project using parts from old casette recorder and discarded burned out CFL. To power it I used Joule thief schematic and simple one transistor recharging controller is in progress on the same board. The battery is half empty, it has 5,5 volts of voltage with load.