Sony TFM - C650WL

[The Swede]

Hello flip clock friends I have been slacking posting my projects for more then 1 year. I have a lot of projects finished and unfinished. I unfortunately don't have to many pictures to show at the moment. But trying to change that.

The white Sony TFM - C650WL was one of the first Sony flip clock radios I bought. I really loved it because of the 230v 50hz version. Most of my other flip clocks and flip clock radios are 100-120v 60hz.

I also acquired the dark grey Sony TFM - C650WL 230v 50hz and the red japanese version which are named TFM-C420. So in the picture I have changed over the red "hood" from the japanese TFM-C420 to my white TFM-C650WL.

I also fixed the blacklight with two 5mm UV-led that I grind flat and polish to give a wider light spread. I use a ac to dc led driver. For me it doesn't create any noise to the radio plus we don't really have AM over here in sweden.

I had a lot of problems with the led going bad or slowly became weaker after a couple of weeks. A friend who know much more about electronics then me said that maybe the cheap led driver leaks ac and that slowly destroys the led. I did connect the led driver to my oscilloscope and it wasn't a super clean signal but I have no clue if it is bad enough to cause this problem. Instead I created a circuit to clean up the dc with a bridge rectifier that goes into a LM317 adjustable voltage regulator. So now I can adjust the light output very precisely and under drive the led's instead. I have not tried this long enough to see if this fixes the problem or if it's just bad led's I own. UV led's seems to have a shorter life span?

All of them are in good condition and I need to completly finish them and post my results.

[flipoclock]

This looks so good with the red case! Much nicer than the dark grey one I have here now, which is also nice, but I am a sucker for the colour red...

[cyb3rbyte]

I love my white TFM-C650W. It's not a backlit clock but there have been several TFM-C420's that have shown up recently in Japan, I'd love to get one of those. Why do they always get the cool colors??

You should see if Engineer could get you a good noiseless power supply / UV led combo. It's what I run in my TFM-C400 and it's great. I'm sure he'll comment shortly!

[Guest]

Yes, the LEDs you had could be running at possibly too much voltage, have some AC ripple current going to them...or who knows. If it is not properly rectified then you'll get too much ripple and the LEDs will suffer. The LEDs I use are 12 volt capable. I make a fully rectified power supply of my own, but is lacks a regulator as I throttle it with a 5 watt 12 volt diode that dumps into a smoothing capacitor before going to the LEDs. It goes into a 310 volt safety capacitor first.

[Mackey]

Thanks for the great post and update on your LED work. does customized solutions like this as well. I'm with flipoclock on this. That clock looks fantastic in red.

[The Swede]

Thank you for the kind comments

I love the red too and the first time I saw a japanese ad about the red TFM-C420 I felt a very urgent and strong need to find one.

cyb3rbyte: Thank you for the idea but my problem isn't the noise. My problem is more that I thought that my LED driver potentially have ac ripple which destroys the LED. In my LED driver there is already a bridge rectifier which should give a clean non ac ripple output. Then I use a second bridge rectifier that feeds into a LM317 circuit which is a very stabble DC voltage regulator. What I don'e is basically a ridicoulous solution. It should clean up the DC signal to give the LED's a good DC source. I have so many 5mm UV LED's that range from 365 nm to 400 nm, which I became fed up by changing them out every 2 months. So that's why I built it this way to exclude the ac ripple that maybe was the cause for them to burn out, or if they just are low quality LED's. I might also overdrive them.


Engineer: It might be possible that I been runing them to hard as I set the potentiometer by eye to get the brightness I feel suitble. I also have the 12v version LED's but they only come in the 400 nm range which looks good but I don't always like that they give so much purple light in certain cases. So I been experimenting with the 365 nm and the 385 nm also. All of these 3 different UV LED's are good in their own way and I always individually test which one I feel looks best every time I do a swap. I looked into how your power supply was made and I was thinking of testing building yours next time instead of buying the cheap chinese led drivers. So thank you very much for that.

Thank you Mackey. And thank you for providing us with your Youtube content. I have not been very active fixing flip clocks or at this forum but I have been watching your videos. I never skip the ads and I watch the ads fully and I always press on the ads that goes to ad people's site to give you as much ad revenue as possible.