12V LED Trouble Light, PCB Details

Opening up this 12V trouble light confirmed my suspicions about the internal design. It seems the double sided printed circuit board is overly complicated for the actual circuit. This could have easily been done on a single sided board, 12V trace down one side, 0V trace down the other and then groups of 3 LEDs in series connecting those traces.

It appears that this product was made up of repurposed components. The hard wired power supply had a label indicating it originally had a coax power plug. The circuit board in the light itself seems to be over complex and had nothing in the way of current or voltage regulation. All if had was an on/off push button switch and 60 LEDs wired as 20 strings of 3 in series. I couldn't see that detail from the exterior as there was a paper label inside the tube covering the back side of the PCB.

The original 12V trouble light was purchased around 2005 from Grizzly.com. It came with a hard wired 12V power supply. I figured I could replace that with a lighter plug and use it in the truck. While that did work for a while, it became apparent that the power supply must have had current regulation to keep from over driving the LEDs. As a result, most of the LEDs burned out.

More to come...
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Intro/Outro:
Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers
https://web.archive.org/web/20170402222425/http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94