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15.9.13

LED Dimmer PWM Hack

This cheap dimmer is designed to blink LEDs with a variable duty cycle. The default frequency can be altered by swapping out a single capacitor. 20 kHz makes a whine-free speed control for a DC motor, 1 Hz gives slow PWM for high power resistive heating loads.




The LED dimmer has can output a decent amount of power and is rated up to 8 A and 12 V. I bought one to try as a PWM (pulse width modulation) speed control on a DC motor. It worked up to a point but the motor whined horribly. Was there some way to adjust the dimmer to avoid this irritating noise?

I was inspired by the teardown in the video below to attempt an easy hack. A useful piece of information was that the oscilloscope showed an output frequency of 680 Hz. I confirmed this for my own dimmer using a multimeter with a frequency setting.



A brief inspection of the hardware told me that the frequency was governed by a 555 astable and could be altered by changing the value of the capacitor connected to pins 2 and 6. After a little further measurement and experimentation, I determined that the value of C3 was 100 nF. 



If you look carefully at the PCB above, you can see the solder blobs where I cackhandedly soldered a 3.3 nF 0805 capacitor in place of C3 on the bottom right of the PCB. This gave a frequency around 20 kHz, which is higher than I can hear, and sure enough when I tried the dimmer with a DC motor there was no more whine. Success!

Next I tried 47 uF electrolytic capacitor in place of C3. The negative pin needed to be soldered on the right hand pad. Unfortunately, I desoldered the SMD cap so carelessly that I destroyed the pad and was forced to scrape away a nearby part of the green mask and solder the capacitor to the exposed track.



Now the dimmer blinked at about 1.5 Hz, as demonstrated using a SSR and 120 V lamp. The video shows that the duty cycle can be varied across almost the full range. This would be useful as a variable power control for a resistive heating element, for which fast PWM would generate unnecessary electromagnetic noise.



13 comments:

Unknown said...

Tom, great article. Thanks for posting it. The board that I received changed a bit and I was wondering if you might be able to tell which capacitor I should replace. Thanks

Here is a link to a picture of the board.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-QImVm0djTgVjFGdGs4WXJUWlE/edit?usp=sharing

Tom said...

Hi Michael! I've seen several different versions of this board but they all have a 555 generating a ramping waveform. The capacitor that governs the timing is connected to pins 2 and 6 on one side and ground on the other. It's probably C1 but the picture is a bit blurry so I can't be sure.

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot Tom. Yeah, my phone camera has seen better days and I really need to get a new one. I'll replace the C1 capacitor with the one you suggested and let you know. Thanks for the reply.

Unknown said...

I finally got around to doing a little soldering and may have done something wrong. I hooked up my 3v wall wort to the PWM and then measured the output voltage when I move the potentiometer and it seems to work fine. However when I plug it into the SSR I get <1v readings and the light doesn't come on. I plug the wall wort directly to the SSR and it works fine. Any advice?

Here are some better pictures.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QImVm0djTgVDRaczFDODdpbk0/edit?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QImVm0djTgZmJWc2ZDUl9IcUE/edit?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QImVm0djTgeTlTSGlibVc4ZkE/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks

Tom said...

3V might be a bit on the low side, try 5V.

Unknown said...

You nailed it. I tried a 5V and didn't see a change so I upped it to a 12v and it works! If I want to be able to slow down the speed even more could i replace the 47 uf capacitor with something like a 100 uf?

Unknown said...

I replaced it with a 470 uf capacitor I had laying around and it did just that. Thanks for all your help!

Tom said...

Great that you got it working Michael.

Anonymous said...

Hi!
Gotta say I love these cheap dimmers, useful for so many things. I use them for speed control for pumps and diy stirplates. I was thinking about modifying it for for SSR control also, for a real cheapo rims setup I'm planning, and was delighted to find ol' 555 in there, made it easy to change frequency. Sadly I did the reverse engineering myself before i found this place. I also found a 100uf to do the job nicely. Since I was adding capacitance I didn't bother to desolder the smd cap, I simply piggybacked the electrolyte. Cheers!

Unknown said...

need schematic diagram help....

Tom said...

Unfortunately, despite the similar case, there are several different versions of the PCB inside. The best advice I can give is that there are two chips, one of them is a 555, and the capacitor that governs the timing is connected to pins 2 and 6 of the 555 on one side and ground on the other.

brokenmonkey said...

Would it be possible to modify this dimmer to have variable-frequency PWM? I don't know much about electronics, but I've seen resistors wired to potentiometers as a form of voltage-based dimming and I'm wondering if something similar can be achieved here with a capacitor and a potentiometer.

The reason is because I would like a cheap dimmer with variable PWM frequency so I can do some tests for a film/video project. I would like to test different PWM frequencies against different video frame rates and cameras with rolling shutter to find the advantages/disadvantages of different PWM frequencies. I know 6 kHz is a safe frequency for video but it can cause audio interference, and 20 kHz is safe for audio but maybe not all types of video. If I can hack together a simple module with a PWM frequency that's variable to the Hz I would be happy. Add in a frequency readout and that would be ideal.

Thanks in advance!

If nothing else perhaps it's possible to wire multiple capacitors to a switch so I can select one of several PWM frequencies. Thoughts?

trazam1986 said...

What was determined to be the best capacitor value to drive a heating element using a SSR. 47uf or 100uf ? What voltage does the cap need to be? Thanks.

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