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Misbehaving Aeroleds Pulsar NS--any similar experiences

DrillBit

Well Known Member
I have a malfunctioning Aeroleds Pulsar NS nav/strobe and wonder if anyone in the VAF world has seen like symptoms. I bought the lights 1.03 warranty lifetimes ago, but first flight didn?t happen until 0.96 of the warranty had run. Want to assess whether appealing to Aeroleds is worth pursuing. Yes, I severely misunderestimated how long the last 10% would take, but jeez, just 10.6 hours on the airframe and I?m looking at shelling out half an AMU for a new nav/strobe?

THE SYMPTOMS:

Port side (red) LED is steady and bright, but strobe is irregular. For two or three cycles, the triple flash is markedly weaker than its brother strobe on the starboard wing (or the Suntail in the back for that matter), with the white LEDs? staying weakly illuminated until the next weak flash. Then the white LED?s go completely dark for a cycle, then the next cycle is a fully bright triple flash with the LEDs going full off. Then weak cycles start again?wash, rinse, and repeat.

Bad connections, especially grounds, are the usual issues according to Aeroleds? website. But I switched port for starboard: The green nav/strobe performed normally whether plugged into the port- or starboard-side connectors at the wing tips; whereas the red nav/strobe misbehaves on the starboard-side, just as it does to port.

On the plane, the two wingtip nav/strobes and taillight/strobe have their synch wires interconnected. But the green nav/strobe stays in synch with the Suntail when it?s hooked up to either side. Given the uneven flash pattern on both sides, it?s hard to say whether the red nav/strobe is in synch or not.

Moreover, the red nav/strobe exhibits the same weak flash, no flash, normal flash cycling behavior on the bench, its bare wires connected to a +12.5V dialed up on a power supply. For grins, I ?scoped the synch wire on the bench set up just to see what it looks like.

For a normal, fully bright flash, the pin starts at 7.4 V DC, then a negative-going, 30-ms pulse down to about 0.5 V occurs and recovers to about 6.6 V for about 35 ms. Then a series of three, positive-going (to 7.4 V), 10-ms pulses occur with an 80-ms period. Finally, at 335 ms from the negative-going edge of the first deep pulse, the voltage steps back up to 7.4 V and stays there for another 940 ms, then the whole cycle repeats.

When the strobe is flashing weakly, the series of 3 10-ms pulses are distorted. After the first pulse goes up to 7.4 V, it stays there past 10-ms, sometimes starting to decay with RC-like behavior. It may or may not get back down to 6.6 V before the second pulse pushes the voltage back up to 7.4. Similar things happen between the 2nd and 3rd pulses, and between the 3rd pulse and the final step back up to 7.4 V, which evidently does not turn off the current going through the white LEDs as they remain dim-ish-ly lit.

On the bench or in the aircraft, the sickly strobe will sometimes generate normal flashes when first powered on for several minutes, then weak flashing behavior begins. Sometimes, the weak flashing behavior begins at power up, and after several minutes a period of normal flashing begins. When I first observed weak flashing becoming normal, I thought maybe the unit had to warm up or something. But then good flashes followed by bad was observed. I don?t have a TC or IR camera to be sure, but the base plate of the unit seems to run hotter when misbehaving.

My guess is some temperature sensitive flaw in the PCB or a component is the culprit. But it?s not predictable what state the system will be in at start up. If it?s good at the start, or becomes good after weakly flashing for a while, it will go from good to bad and back again without, so far, any discernible cause.
 
Send a note to AEROLed - they have a nice track record of taking care of customers even with the warranty a little expired.

Carl
 
Even better, call them.

I had a set of Pulsars with a known issue. Were it not for a post made here by Dean of Aeroleds the would not have replaced them under recall. In fact I was told point blank that such a recall program did not exist. Then I sent a screen grab from here with Dean's post. That got a new set of Pulsars sent my way.
 
Just a data point there are two generations of these ... the newest ones have a "12V" sticker on the box but are otherwise indistinguishable.

The first generation had a lot of noise issues.

I purchased the previous generation from Vans and they sat on the shelf during my build, AeroLED swapped them for the revised part, great customer service!
 
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AeroLED Customer Service

I had a couple of elements quit working on an AeroLED wingtip nav/anticolllision light. Still under warranty. I called and the lady COULD NOT HAVE BEEN NICER. (wish I could remember her name) She asked if I wanted new lights same as the old ones or the new ones with a double flash. Didn't ask if I wanted to repair or replace, didn't ask about warranty. I picked the double flash lights and they shipped an entire set of new wingtip and tail lights. She asked me to use the box the new lights came in to ship the old ones back... which meant they didn't even wait for the old lights to arrive at their place. New lights arrived in a couple of days and worked perfectly. I sent the old ones back (at my expense, but hey, what do you want, an egg in your beer?) Truly spectacular customer service.
 
I had a couple of elements quit working on an AeroLED wingtip nav/anticolllision light. Still under warranty. I called and the lady COULD NOT HAVE BEEN NICER. (wish I could remember her name) She asked if I wanted new lights same as the old ones or the new ones with a double flash. Didn't ask if I wanted to repair or replace, didn't ask about warranty. I picked the double flash lights and they shipped an entire set of new wingtip and tail lights. She asked me to use the box the new lights came in to ship the old ones back... which meant they didn't even wait for the old lights to arrive at their place. New lights arrived in a couple of days and worked perfectly. I sent the old ones back (at my expense, but hey, what do you want, an egg in your beer?) Truly spectacular customer service.

If you think she is nice on the phone, visit the shop. You will be in for a real treat! Everyone there considers good customer service their goal. At least that is my experience.
 
Thanks everybody for sharing your experiences. Aeroleds is living up to their reputation--they reached out to me with a PM and I'll be getting an RMA for repair or replace shortly. I'll let the group know the final outcome...
 
Best Customer Service!

I also had an issue with AeroLeds which I purchased thru Van's and then did not fly near as soon as I thought I would. AeroLeds replaced both wing tip and tail strobe even tho the warranty was expired. Susan Calvin is the gal I talked to--she is the best! Can't say enough about the service AeroLeds provided. Somewhere down the road, I intend to replace the landing lights--sure bet the new lights will be AeroLeds!
 
I've had to replace all my triple flash AeroLEDs with the newer version, as well.
 
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