Quote:
Originally Posted by GreyingJay
Thankfully, the lights were reverse-polarity protected.
|
Usually if you put any diode backwards on a power supply insufficient to destroy it, it will simply not conduct any meaningful current. Even a light emitting diode (LED). Of all the things where you can do that - there's a great one you can usually not destroy something.
Now if those LEDs have some crazy microcontroller - then you'd have a problem.
Watched someone do that with LED modules for a large sign once.
At $500 a module I think blowing out the module controllers wasn't very fun.
On things I used to make that were low power I used to put a bridge rectifier in the DC power input. This insured that no matter the applied polarity the circuit always got the right polarity. Sure I lost some voltage doing that but when I found them hooked up backwards I would just say 'there's some part money well spent'.