Halogen bulbs put out a lot of focused light but they do it at the expense of burning up a lot of Watts and generating a lot of heat. The cost for an LED replacement like the one seen disassembled above has come down quite a bit. This drove [Jonathan Foote] to purchase several units and he just couldn’t resist tearing them apart to try out a couple of hacks.
The one we find most interesting is a PWM based dimming hack he pulled off with an Arduino board and a FET. The bulbs are designed to be dimmable through the 12V supply that feeds the light fixture. But the relationship of dimmer position to light level is not linear and [Jonathan] figured he could do better. His solution is to add a FET in parallel with the LEDs. When activated it basically shunts the current around the diodes, resulting in a dimming. The video below shows this in action. We wonder if the flashing is a camera artifact or if you pick that up with your eye as well?
You may also be interested to read his post on Gelling the LED bulbs. Gels are colored filters for lights (or camera lenses). He cuts his preferred color down to size and inserts it between the LEDs and the lenses.
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