REVISIT: Faulty Backlight on Jacob Jensen Alarm Clock

[@ristopentikainen]

I’m really happy to see this revisit video before I started to fix my expensive radio. Now I know there is no fix and I will claim manufacturer for new product! Thanks Wince!

[@etiennevanharen3893]

Great revisit Vince, that luminescent stuff was new for me too. Another thing learned.

[@VVerVVurm]

props for doing this follow up! BEWARE: if you are new to scopes: PLEASE remember to check for the scopes MAX INPUT VOLTAGE! you can easily overload and damage the input by probing to high voltages. 35 volts might already be the limit! you can get probes with build in voltage divider (typically 1:10) to probe higher voltage signals. I mention this because it is a trap for people who are used to use multimeters where usually everything up to 400v is not an issue.

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks VVerVVurm, I didn't know about the max voltage :-)

[@felixlutticken5694]

Hey Vince, I wanted to thank you for your great videos,you inspired me to try to repair my TV which had no signal on most programs for about 2 years. I opened up the TV and found out that it was just because of a loose plug on the mainboard. 😅 Keep on your great work 👍😁

[@instahawk8422]

Thats good to give the people who advised you on what it is you giving them an honourable mention in your video by highlighting there comments

[@marks_view1486]

Vince, really enjoyed the video and "EL" tape is a new one to me, you learn something new every day . Love the safety precautions. Look forward to the video.

[@davidmelbourne5480]

As you progress, the scope will become your eyes and the meter not as much (the measurement here demonstrated why). The 5 second timer is probably from the main "blob" IC (black thing on the board) via an output line. You could learn a lot by scoping the signals from this IC to the yellow step-up transformer which provides the 60V for the backlight. I remember you fixed a handheld video game that had a tube type EL display - I think it had a step-up system too. You can get quite a little sting off of one of these too! Great revisit!

[@archiepops]

Hi Vince. I love your videos..you have taught me so much about electronics that I ever thought possible! Keep up the good work! :)

[@thomasesr]

You were measuring with the ground lead on the DC coupled ground and AC doesn't use a ground so you have to measure between the two springs. Your scope shows you a frequency reading and a Vrms (AC voltage). You should learn how to use the osciloscope trigger function so you can capture the signal (snapshot) to measure without having to press the button all the time.

[@vaualbus]

And he should buy a real scope not this ebay scrap scopes that basic show only aliasing signals😅🤣

[@TBL_stevennelson]

Supporting his knowledge of this scope will encourage his curiosity and maybe he will buy one.

[@andersmmvfc.8376]

Osiloscope is komplicerad and vince will gett better! Nice comment!

[@thomasesr]

@@vaualbus this crappy scope is better than nothing, and already have been useful for Vince. I don't see why anyone who isn't a professional would ever need a better scope anyways.

[@AnonymousRepair]

Yip you are right

[@2bad83]

Hi Vince, Great stuff you always live and you learn, That’s a EL Sheet Which has a ITO-coated top layer and a conducive phosphor layer(AC Input) a Dielectric layer and the a outter frame bus bar(AC Input). Possibly you have a break in the outter bus bar or the conducive phoshor layer. Good if u do experiment but remember they are in layers so you could short them out.

[@lamtatyan]

Great video. We all, as well as you, learn from this repairing. However, I think many of us still hope to see you fully repair this alarm clock, with bringing back the back-lighting to the clock sooner or later.

[@joshm264]

Hey Vince, I recommend you look at the EEVBlog video on Oscilloscope basics. Even with these little mini scopes, watching it really helped. Cheers!

[@Iamalizard]

I have a somewhat cheap Owon USB scope and learnt a lot (everything) from the manual. Is very handy for my working at the local repair cafe because mobile and useful as Vince shows, and makes me looks like a pro...

[@thomasesr]

Nice to see you got the osciloscope like I suggested. Its really useful as you can see. Keep up the good work mate!

[@KieranSymes]

It's so cool to go back and see how far you've come Vince. Well done 👍

[@andersmmvfc.8376]

Awsome I do not know if it is only sweden but it is you name day in sweden so congratulations on both that and finding the fault! I hope some one here in the comments give you a link to a good strip!

[@Boogie_the_cat]

The main reasons EL wire\ EL tape goes faulty is time and decay. Over time, the phosphor that the AC voltage excites will wear down. This happens with normal use and decay will be accelerated by high temperature. The other main reason for failure is if the phosphor powder that is in the tape \ wire is exposed to oxygen in the air. The EL wire is encased in clear plastic to prevent this, and the EL tape has a clear coating on top of the phosphor to prevent oxidation. Hope this helps.

[@johnaverbeck7197]

you have to measure between both springs to get the correct measurement. One probe on one spring the other probe on the other spring.

[@Firecul]

Yip, having your ground on the wrong side of the transformer won't normally give the reading you want. The positioning was good though if you were trying to probe the clock's normal circuit though.

[@Lightning666]

oscilloscope has only 50v input, I think it can burn it if connect directly to the springs.

[@GadgetUK164]

Fantastic stuff Vince =D Great to see you using the scope!!!

[@greenaum]

You can get little squares of EL plastic for just a few quid, and in a range of attractive colours! And yes, like you mentioned cutting a hole in, you can cut it to shape and size. The whole thing is a sandwich. A conductive back layer, the EL phosphor itself, and then a transparent conductive front layer. You'll see a little electrode sticking out of one corner for one layer, and the other you can connect anywhere. Try it, please! All the usual component suppliers sell EL sheets (and also EL wire but forget that for now). You can also get a driver circuit that steps up 5V DC to the 100V or so it needs. The driver module is like a fiver and the sheets about the same depending on the size, so it's not a huge investment. You won't need the driver circuit for this clock since it already has it's own, with the transformer etc. But it's fun to play with so you may as well get one, and a few sheets and maybe some EL wire and just mess about with it, if you want to. But to fix this, you just need a sheet of EL, why not a lovely aqua blue? You might need a bit of wire to connect the electrodes to the springs. Get a sheet of EL, test it with the electrodes, then cut it down to size. Then re-revisit, bang! an actually repaired, if horribly cheap and nasty, clock by some Danish bloke who surely only designed the plastic case and not the nasty stuff inside.

[@troseberry91585]

Two videos in one day? What a treat!

[@coll6]

For your scope that AC doesn't mean what you may think it does. This might be a bit difficult to explain. But imagine a normal wave you might see from mains. It will be going positive and negative equally above and below 0V. But say you were to connect 5V DC to that wave. The wave will move up 5V and it's '0V' point will now be at 5V. This is called a super position of voltages where the AC wave 'rides' the DC signal. Sometimes is is necessary to know this. Some circuits will make 'AC' by turning a DC signal on and off fast through an inductor which will create an AC signal. But this signal before going through the inductor will be a square wave from 0V to whatever voltage it maxes out at. What the scope does is it can filter out that DC wave when you are reading the signal. When you set the scope to AC you filter out all DC signals putting the waves 0V at the 0V level. The DC setting won't filter that out so you can see the DC component of the wave. I may not have explained it well but usually you keep it on DC to see the whole picture and AC is more for specialized cases. But as long as you know what you are looking for it really does not matter but someone here could give a better explanation than I could in a comment.

[@racer4200]

Fun fact. EL panels were used in the original Big Red Neo Geo Arcade cabinets to iluminate the selected game marquee.

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

Ohh wow! Did they last ok or get quite dim?

[@racer4200]

@@SproutyPottedPlant Unfortunately They didnt last. At least none of them did in my cabs. But I think there are some people making repros now.

[@SharkoonBln]

Even funnier fact: The Apollo spacecraft´s instrument panels were lit by EL technology. The first astronauts were asked if they prefer incandescent panel lighting or EL, and they opted for EL. This stuff was cutting edge almost 60 years ago :)

[@speedwaynutt]

Excited to see what Vince tries to fix this year.

[@lesleymunro4964]

if you can't get EL tape, what you may be able to do is measure AC voltage at the input side of the transformer, then just tap off an LED via a current limiting resistor to backlight the LCD. Since it's AC, you could even use 2 LEDs wired opposite to each other, then through the resistor, and each one would light in each half wave of the AC.

[@nicolaesders6468]

Hi Vince. We have had that clock from new. The backlight was never particularly good even steaight out of the box.

[@JozefMackovic]

Hi Vince, you can put an thin plexiglass with the same dimensions and lit it with a led, diy backlight :)

[@TBL_stevennelson]

I enjoy your channel. Thanks

[@Russian32gb]

Good morning Vince, greetings from Greece, well ... interesting , very good stuff the last 2 videos, detailed information from viewers and you , well I'm thinking if that EL tape is cheap buy it cut it in size from the faulty one and install it and reassemble it, just like Dave Davidson said in the 7th comment, or diy it using led like you said but they are ac and dc i think so choose the right ones

[@Blacklab99]

Interesting video. Tons of this stuff for sale on eBay. All colours. Go on, fix it.

[@crownfam882]

This guys awesome😎

[@ford1546]

congratulations. with the new super cheap oscilloscopes I have the same but mine is white. slightly too low screen resolution so they are not always easy to see details.

[@MyklBlue69]

Get some of that tape and do a revisit revisit pleeeeeeas! 🙏🙏

[@Fifury161]

17:45 - one of the advantages of EL displays is the fact that you can cut them to shape!

[@AndrewFomin]

I believe that your multimeter doesn't show voltage correctly because of the signal frequency. The multimeter shows that the frequency is 5.6KHz. I checked this multimeter manual and it says that it can measure sin waveform signals in the range of 40Hz to 1KHz. 5.6KHz is way above its capabilities. Also, 5.6KHz means that period is 0.17 milliseconds. In order to correctly capture it, your scope must take readings a few times faster than that.

[@stefanmarinescu5086]

Wow :) nice!!! I did not know about el tape.

[@m4dizzle]

Adafruit has a great high level tutorial on working with EL and sells the stuff too :)

[@rocktoroll77]

That was pretty awesome video both parts never seen a back light like that b4

[@BodziuM]

yey, my comment is in the video :) i'm so happy !

[@andersmmvfc.8376]

Congratulations!

[@andersmmvfc.8376]

@Smattless you should read a book on how to be funny. Trolls are not!

[@thetechgenie7374]

The transformer would have gave that away. You can buy EL sheet for cheap and cut it down to size. You can also convert it over to LED, but you need a diffuser behind LCD if you go that route and to remove the HV circuit.

[@jesus_perez_r]

Yey REVISIT!

[@ektaSingh09]

80👍 Wow wonderful sharing Revisit good job fr

[@MizuhoChan]

They used EL backlights in the gameboy light, which was only released in Japan.

[@AnxiousDavid]

think what you were looking for was electrons for the current. i could be wrong because i am not sure how they make the EL paper but that's traditionally what you have with metal conductors.

[@Operational117]

If ever you’re wondering if a component is an inductor, put any steel or iron bits near it. If it’s attracted when it’s powered, it’s an inductor (or in general a coil). But LEDs don’t look like that anyway. It’s always a telltale sign that it’s an inductor if it’s got a yellow heatshrink around it. Also, if it shows resistance both ways, it’s not an LED, as they are diodes, permitting current one way (would show 0 Ohm or at least a low ohm value), but not the other (would show either open line (OL) or an extremely high resistance (multiple, even dozens (even hundreds?) of mega-ohms)). That EL tape, however, sounds like an interesting new concept for my head to wrap around. If what I read from the other comments (from this and the original video) is true, then it *SHOULD* show an Ohm-reading between the two carbon pads. Since that is not the case, and you even proved the fault by using your daughter’s watch as a testing ground, that panel is obviously toast. Would’ve been great if you could confirm if the EL tape on your daughter’s watch is showing an ohm reading other than open line (OL).

[@CLC-1000]

Shame you could not get it to work Vince, but still it's quite a cool clock.

[@KorAllRBare]

Well now.. I never knew about those type of EL Film backlighting nor did I know about the EL Wire, Sure Glad I watch every video of yours Vince.. ASPU I dropped a like, oh and in your previous video I suggested you hack in a LED but if-n you do I would back track in the circuit before the AC is produced.. **Addendum** Maybe a short length of EL Wire might work?

[@krusty4793]

Thats a real quick revisit :D

[@beavis6363]

What?! You didn't cut a circle into it and wire some jumpers to your daughter's watch face? Kidding sport. Interesting stuff as always. I did wonder if you where going to graft the watch face though. ;)

[@Mymatevince]

I was tempted :-)

[@wayne7939]

Don't think you noticed but your meter should have had the probes across the springs to measure the luminous panel voltage and if you look back the frequency of that ac is not 50Hz like mains but very high frequency, your meter showed something like 5.634 khz frequency.

[@technixbul]

You have to probe between 2 springs not between spring and GND

[@jochenwuerfel]

4:17 I'm in the video :O

[@hooeezit]

Here's a company in the UK that sells the tape. The small ones are not expensive. elpanelandtape.co.uk/el-panel/ An EL tape is effectively a capacitor. The 'middle' of a capacitor is the dielectric. In an EL tape, the dielectric emits photons when it discharges. When you apply AC to the two ends of an EL tape, the capacitor is charging and discharging repeatedly, so it keeps emitting light. If you had a high speed camera, you will see it fading in and out in cycle with the AC waveform.

[@hlat9318]

I’ve got a Jacob Jensen model t3 phone works fine but lcd display doesn’t work cant find parts anywhere hope someone can help please

[@zer0b0t]

Sorry I forgot to mention the transformer in my comment but yeah, I believe those lights are not that sturdy, they only light up a certain amount of times and then they fade or die. You could've try with a higher voltage just to check if that was the issue.

[@PlanetRuncorn]

just watched the 1st video , the yellow component L1 , is an Inductor ...

[@codebeat4192]

It is PWM (Pulse Witdh Modulation), not AC like I said at the previous video. When you put PWM (pulsing DC = digital) into a transformer (analog), you will get some form of AC because of the (step-up) transformer. In fact it glows only on pulse, not on AC like explained in this video (search on KZbin): "Applied science Build an electroluminescent glass panel display". The PWM is a reason why you don't read a value on the other pin because it is not AC but DC (however pulsed).

[@daveharkin4731]

I think it would be a good addition to your videos by highlighting the comments which would produce more comments which would in turn help your channel grow

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

It’s good to know there is an actual backlight in it, maybe a lot of them were faulty to begin with like the one I threw into the recycling.

[@Mikie1959]

you may contact the company that makes that clock and tell them the problem and ask if they have any of those still in stock they make just give them to you.

[@Lightning666]

Why? On EBAY he can buy different types of EL tape, and it can be cut in any place, and it has two traces on back side. I don't thint Vince couldn't solve this puzzle)

[@andymouse]

Well done!,

[@wayne7939]

Ali expess have cutable electroluminescenct strip cheap all colours high voltage ac too (high as in 40v )

[@K5smold]

DSO SHELL? Love u man hey I would suggest not using the..idk much if your in a budget for a scope maybe go used/old...I personal have a owon vds1022i usb scope it’s only 25mhz but actually useful...idk don’t take it rude...One of my first kits was the DSO I forget but the DSO DIY oscilloscope that does not come with the case red PCB..I think for general audio spectrum analyzation-ish type stuff those little DSO’s are OK that’s what I use mine for...Also the scope I recommend it is USB isolated and only about $100 in the US at least

[@Hammerjockeyrepair]

you can buy cuttable sheets of EL panels cheap!

[@billjon2732]

If you hold the ok button for a while the measurements will disappear giving more screen room.

[@stuart7999]

Not really sure how tissue will stop you getting a shock :) but thank you for the video Vince...

[@bazahaza]

its non conductive.

[@stuart7999]

@@bazahaza Tissue will not stop you getting a shock :)

[@bazahaza]

Why not? It's non conductive. can you explain?

[@getyourkicksagain]

@@bazahaza moisture from your fingers and/or the environment will conduct electricity easily through absorbent tissue. A high enough voltage will even jump through a completely dry medium.

[@bazahaza]

@@getyourkicksagain it did the trick here though.

[@teknozombie4893]

It`s what they used in the new Tron film for the suits. I also have EL Tape in my PC build as it is mor flexable and looks good as you can do any shape you want, I bought it from the people that actually made the suits in Tron.

[@KB1UIF]

I also sometimes have trouble seeing the light !! lol

[@PlanetRuncorn]

MyMateVince, I have watched a lot of your videos, and they are good, however i have noticed at time you have not looked at the writing or markings on the board, so i think you need to take some time look at the writing or marking on the board when you fix things they can tell you a lot .

[@jasonbucy]

Please invest in some small alligator clips lol :p

[@DrsIrHenkJanJansen]

Vince, try this one www.cochief.com/en/category/EL-Backlight/A01_EL_Light_Backlight.html or this link butlertechnologies.com/products/back-lighting/ good luck with this project hope you can get it back to work.

[@ford1546]

If you measure 50 volts or more then you must have 10X probe probe, wire or else you will destroy oscilloscopes. do not set the switch to gnd I think you short circuit if I remember correctly. ebay 282838437503 Taux d'échantillonnage maximum en temps réel: 1 MSa / s Largeur de bande analogique: 0 - 200 KHz Plage de sensibilité: 5 - 20 mV / div Tension d'entrée maximale: 50 Vpk (sonde 1X) Impédance d'entrée: 1M ohms / 20pF Précision: 12 bits Longueur de l'enregistrement: 1024 points Modes de couplage: DC / AC / GND Plage de base de temps: 500s / Div - 10us / Div Modes de déclenchement: automatique, normal et simple Position de déclenchement: centre de la mémoire tampon Tension d'alimentation: DC 9 V (8 - 10 V) Consommation de courant: ~ 120 mA @ 9 V Matériau: Composants électroniques ABS taille: taille du produit: 10.2 * 7.3 * 2.1cm Taille de la carte mère: 94 x 65 mm Taille de la carte analogique: 65 x 47 mm (2,56 x 1,85 po) Taille de l'écran: 52 x 40 mm (2 x 1,57 po) Couleur blanche

[@VVerVVurm]

this is a common trap for people accustomed to multimeter use. I saw someone frying his input by randomly probing some phone lines. some cheap handheld scopes only tolerate up to 35 volts peak. A good probe will likely cost more than the scope used in this video. xD

[@livebrain]

You should create a discord server ;) Ps transformers only work on AC

[@Rasher123]

what's the advantage of discord over KZbin?

[@Mr-ZinK]

@@Rasher123 live help, quick way to message everyone interested in fixing things and those who're more experienced will be able to give information on problems and help us all learn, post KZbin links to newly released videos as KZbin doesn't always notify..... there's many reasons on why to have a discord server, its just a better place for communication

[@LiuWoods]

1st!

[@andymouse]

I wish my DSO was black

[@dizzy4017]

You should challenge yourself and try and fix and xbox 360 with the red ring of death

[@GADGET-gq7nf]

Buy some tape and get it working

[@andytipping70]

you wont light an led with 1 1.5v battery

[@VVerVVurm]

well with the EL inverter he has about 30 or so volts .. he could chain 10 white LEDs together :D

[@andytipping70]

@@VVerVVurm at a tiny current??? 9mA/meter so lets say its 4cm long is a third of a miliamp

[@VVerVVurm]

@@andytipping70 hmm true .. but the EL foil isn't that bright either .. some newer InGaN green led are scarily efficient and quite "bright" at ~ 40µA. but new EL foil would probably be easier, more even and cheaper

[@getyourkicksagain]

It's entirely possible to light an LED with 1.5V or even less. Look up "Joule Thief".

[@andytipping70]

@@getyourkicksagain yup i totally understant the concept of a joule thief - but by the time you've done all that and found room for it in the case - may as well have sent off for the E L tape

[@instahawk8422]

I’m sure some calculators have this type of light strip on it