As it turns out, the end-of-financial-year sales had a particularly lucrative deal in the form of discounted OnePass subscriptions – just $12 for the first year, meaning free delivery without minima from shops such as Kmart, Target, Bunnings and Officeworks to name a few. No longer do I have to go down to my local store to snag a deal, just to be disappointed that there is no stock – instead, they’ll pick and send the stock to me. With such a cheap offer, it would pay for itself in an order or two as even adult Opal fares aren’t exactly negligible.
But what to do with such a subscription? Buy stuff, of course. Straight to the clearance section I go and I find some “LED Neon” for sale for $3 a piece. While it is cheap plastic novelties which I usually abhor, for the price, I thought it’d be fun to take a closer look at a couple. So I ended up buying some “tat” for fun … my apologies to planet Earth.
The Items
The LED Neon Cactus and Dinosaur came in a colour-print, retail hanging cardboard box. They are Anko branded, a Kmart own-brand. I chose these two as they were amongst the cheapest and I think green is a much better colour than the others they had on sale which were a pink/purple.
The units are Made in China (no surprises here) and have the RCM on them, not that they’re likely to cause any interference as they’re probably quite simple devices. They are designed for indoor use only, with the boxes suggesting a date code of Week 14 of 2024 and Week 50 of 2023. The items appear to be labeled for sale in Kmart AU, NZ and Target AU. Barcode numbers for the product are 9341110181823 and 9341110181854. They also appear to carry product numbers of 43-351-510 and 43-351-541 (Kmart); and 68-734-770 and 86-734-800 (Target).
It’s clear that this item is not intended to be a toy, but some reviews seem to suggest that “children love it”. I suppose the wire could be a danger to kids. It is also interesting to note that there is an electronic “anti-steal” sticker inside the packet … for such a cheap product, I’d be surprised if anyone would actually want to steal it. Perhaps that’s why it’s on clearance …
Aside from a one-page leaflet in each that I quickly threw out, what we get inside is the decorative light which has wall-mounting eyelets, a bit of very thin wire, a battery box (eneloops not included) and a USB plug. I had seen some of their more expensive products had a dimmer, but unfortunately not this one.
The Construction
The clear plastic battery case has a cover secured by a philips head screw (removed). This does reduce the risk of accidental battery ingestion, but makes battery replacement a bit inconvenient. Being transparent, it is clear to see that the insides consist of just a cheap three-position slide switch and a 10-ohm 0.5/1W resistor. The wires themselves are surprisingly thin … I suppose that may make them less unsightly but also might reduce the cost.
The LED neon is actually a flexible silicone rubber strip which has an LED tape embedded. The LEDs fire into the side, which is coated in a layer of white silicone rubber, diffusing the light into the translucent silicone and forming a “bead” of light that is remarkably even. There is only the slightest hint that there are discrete LEDs in the strip.
The strip sits inside a white plastic “former” which holds the flexible tape into shape, forming the dinosaur or cactus forms. There is about 80cm of flexible LED neon in this product. The sides of the neon are ribbed, perhaps to improve retention especially in places where the neon has to turn tight radii.
Testing
Put in the batteries, flip the switch to “BO” for battery operated, and off we go. The cactus was more of a cooler green than the dinosaur which was slightly more of a leafy yellow green. Nevertheless, both seemed to work without any noticeable flaws and are actually quite bright. Plugging in USB power and flipping it to the USB position also worked just fine, shining even brighter. At night with the lights off, even just one was bright enough to make my room difficult to sleep in despite being 1W nominal power rated!
There was not much that I could test, objectively, except for the I-V curve of the unit as operating with its supplied 10-ohm resistor. For this, I employed the Keithley 2450 SourceMeter and Kickstart 2 software.
As expected of a system without active feedback regulation, the current consumed depends on voltage. This results in a system that is bright on freshly charged batteries and dims over time. Using 1.5V alkaline cells for a total of 4.5V, the initial current draw is expected to lie in the range of 160-200mA. Using rechargeable Ni-MH cells for a nominal 3.6V sees just 80-110mA. Of course, this will change as the battery discharges, however, with Ni-MH’s relatively flat middle, a decent brightness can be sustained for around a day. Just beware of over discharge! The nominal 5V USB gives a little more oomph at 200-240mA, which should also be enough to keep most power banks operating.
Of course, being so low powered, they barely get warm with the hot spot in the image about 3 degrees C above the background ambient (which, when considering the thermal imager’s own error of +/- 2 degrees C, is barely significant). After an hour of USB operation, the hottest part was unsurprisingly the battery case near the resistor which reached 28.1 degrees C, a temperature rise of about 12 degrees C.
Conclusion
It seems that the idea of LED neon is a rather interesting concept evolving out of LED tape. Stick it into a translucent silicone rubber channel with white walls and it diffuses nicely enough to appear as a solid line of light. The effect is visually quite appealing. For my $3 (clearance price), I get around 80cm of LED neon in a plastic former, a battery holder, a switch, a resistor, some wire and a USB plug. Given how inflation is going, I’d say this is not a bad deal.
But as for its actual usefulness – it seems nothing but a novelty gimmick. While I’ve seen LED neon used in architectural lighting in place of LED tape, this cactus and dinosaur aren’t particularly interesting pieces of art that would see much practical use. I suspect the proliferation of “gaming RGB” and streaming culture has led to demand for such items for background set dressing and perhaps some of these have been used as kids toys (when they really shouldn’t). Eventually, these may end up in landfill, just like many Christmas lights. As a result, I do feel a slight remorse having bought into this and wasting transport on getting it delivered.
But it was fun … that I cannot deny. But I can’t see Wesfarmers making money if people use their subscriptions like I do …
