Ott-lite Rev Eng: Part 1

I have an Ott lite, if you haven’t already guessed: I actually have two Ott lite bulbs, and one ott lite stand. Mostly people would go buy another Ott-lite stand, but me being the ornery cranky old person that I am, I decided to hack up my own stand to save on money, since I managed to bungle my paycheck and I’m not gonna have money for a while now.

This is a simple hack/reverse engineer attempt, in that lamps are not usually complicated. However, being careful, searches for the lamp bulb technical specs turned up nothing on the internet. Amazingly, no one seemed interested in using these lamps in ways not originally intended, which I intend to change fairly soon.

First, trying to take apart the casing proved to be difficult, and I eventually gave up, since breaking the only ‘official’ lamp stand I had in the name of reverse engineering seemed a bit… overkill. However, it did seem like there was at least one transformer in there, so something was going on. So, I just took the stand into the circuit lab, and found that the lamp stand’s output into the lamp bulb had exactly the same characteristics as the juice that comes out of the wall: 60Hz, 120V.

Now that is a mystery: what is that transformer doing then? I doubt it’s doing anything with the power, since voltage isn’t changing. The only strange thing was that the output of the stand was more akin to a triangle wave than a pure sine wave. Perhaps it’s a current limiter?

The only thing that remains to be done is create an actually stand, or run more tests on the stand to see if it does indeed function as a current limiter. Stay tuned.