I got a nice little weather station as a gift about a decade ago. It’s been pretty accurate and the display is usually nice and bright and colourful. Over the last while, however, the backlight has gone from bright, to flickering, to flashing once in a while, to completely dead. This made the unit almost useless unless it was daytime and you were standing right in front of it.
Today I cracked it open and gave fixing it a shot. It came apart pretty easily, but I learned later that with the problem I had that I didn’t need to remove the green circuit board. Removing it led to a lot of frustration and grief as it took me many tries to get everything lined up again.
Anyway, it turned out that there were two problems. One was that one of the wires wasn’t actually soldered to the backlight – there was a glob of solder and the wire was just resting against it. I thought that’d be an easy fix but unfortunately, it didn’t make any difference.
What I ended up doing was ignoring the original LED driver circuitry altogether and connected it to the power jack (tip positive). I put a two-pin female header in series to I could easily try different resistors:
1K was a little dim, 100 ohms was better, but I finally settled on 47 ohms. That made for about 110mA, well within a regular 1/4W resistor’s capacity, and considering there are four LEDs in parallel, that’s about 28mA per LED – nice and low. I’m pretty pleased with how it’s working at this point:
Still, I’m going to run it for a few days to make sure that the resistor and backlight aren’t warming up before I solder the resistor in permanently and button the whole thing back up.
Hopefully this means I’ll get at least another ten years out of it.