Fake Solid State Relay Teardown And Explanation!
Added 2024-04-02 15:24:03 +0000 UTCHow bad is it, and what to expect. Is it an OK product, all "fakeness" aside?
The Mr Carlson's Lab electronics forum is here: https://mrcarlsonslab.com/
If you are enjoying these videos and the shared circuits, you can let me know by tapping the heart symbol below.
Here is a link to the list of video's here on Patreon, NEW LIST of Videos: https://www.patreon.com/posts/8239565
To expand this post, click the large black video title right below the video.
To see all the comments, click the "load more comments" tab at the top left of the comments section multiple times until the number at the right top stops counting.
Comments
This style of device is often used in 3D printers to control the large bed heaters. My kit came with an "Omron" device that actually appeared to be a legit budget model. I installed a full-spec one from Digikey and compared them a little before installation. Neither one was potted. The expensive one had a larger Triac and a different board layout. The budget model is marked that the heatsink must be earthed. It also had branded low-tier parts.
Keri Rautenkranz
2024-08-21 02:01:44 +0000 UTCIt’s kinda easy not to fall for this: buy parts from a major distributor like DigiKey, Newark / RS, Allied Electronics, Mouser, ELFA/Distrelec, Avnet, perhaps Jameco, or look for old stock that looks right on eBay - from US, Canadian and European sellers.On eBay the major indicator is unique pictures that show details that look right. If you are not familiar with how the particular parts looked when they were made a couple decades ago, look for devices from that era that used them and closeup pictures etc. As a rule of thumb, no laser marking before late 90s, and even then only select few vendors used it and then only on ceramic packages. I have some late-90s Analog Devices cerdips that were laser-marked. That was quite unique back then. Anything from AliExpress and from Chinese eBay vendors should be considered junk and/or fake parts unless you know exactly what you’re doing and can independently verify their performance to the datasheet in all major areas. That usually means lots of custom test jigs - not necessarily expensive, just needs know-how, and people who have it usually just buy legit parts to save themselves the hassle.
Kuba Sunderland-Ober
2024-05-21 15:52:50 +0000 UTCThis episode made me queasy. Counterfeit parts?! 60A outer label with a 40A-rated part?! Pour black crap all over the top so that it can't be replaced (or not self-immolate?!). ~25 min. in..."ah, this is one of the better ones"... Damn. :-(
Scuba Man
2024-04-29 20:28:54 +0000 UTCyes great teardown, impressive always to see inside.
Rolf-Dieter Klein
2024-04-16 07:35:19 +0000 UTCYes, but isn't the point of this video that when he did preliminary testing of the devices, they turned up fake? I wouldn't mind some videos about how to safely test things like this (high current or high voltage) to see if they are either fake or advertised beyond the claims for real parts. I thought that what was inside that was good, and that was bad, were interesting choices.
Chris Bennett
2024-04-11 19:23:53 +0000 UTCDik za video
Jozef Harang
2024-04-08 04:13:13 +0000 UTCI would like to see a better quality designed device for sure
Michael Miller
2024-04-07 21:39:55 +0000 UTCThank you for 'serious ' discussion of watts and amps.
charles
2024-04-04 20:21:41 +0000 UTCInteresting teardown. I learned my lesson decades ago using questionable parts from a once thriving retail electronics experimenter chain. It was a high end audio amp and would oscillate before clipping. Replaced with SK series parts, worked perfectly.
Steve Foudray
2024-04-04 13:07:00 +0000 UTCA revamped design would be a very interesting project, Paul. I have several of these "relays" which I am afraid to use due the uncertainty of what is inside. Redesigning them into the same enclosure would be super cool.
Roman Charak
2024-04-03 23:04:07 +0000 UTCIt's really sad that the stuff out of the big C can't be relied on to be up to advertised specs. It seems like complete fraud to me. I have bought several of these for my CNC projects and have thrown away many as well. and like you say it depends on who the manufacture was. I would be interested in seeing a reliable design in similar physical foot print for replacement of these junk parts down line as I am sure these are all going to fail at some point. If you decide to go there that would be great. I always learn something from you. Thanks. Steve
Steve Crisp
2024-04-03 20:07:57 +0000 UTCPaul, you have not said what you were going to do with this device. I would think there would be a better way to heat your shop. You sure put a lot of work in this just for YouTube content. I agree buyers should be aware of Amazon China parts.To be honest, I can not dream that I would use this for others to have a remote circuit breaker. Also you did not use any thermal paste to the aluminum bar.
Larry { N7LUF }
2024-04-03 19:44:22 +0000 UTCI suggest getting an iSesamo metal spudger like Big Clive uses instead of a flathead screwdriver for prying.
Jeff Groves
2024-04-03 11:04:19 +0000 UTCI don’t think the situation now is the same as it has been. Yes, mismarked parts happen. I also dealt with a lot of legit parts that did not function properly, including a bidirectional bus transceiver from a reputable vendor sold by the millions that did not work according to the datasheet, but their smaller competitor’s part worked perfectly. There has always been parts from one vendor that was less reliable or had a tighter distribution than others, and some vendors that you could trust and others you could not. All vendors make mistakes. That is human, not dishonest. One company I worked at from their infancy to their becoming a multibillion dollar industry leader started by buying cheap RAMs that were rejected by the manufacturers and ESS testing them just to work in their application. The RAMs had metal caps, and sometimes the caps would fall off during testing. We did have some dishonest open market sellers during the RAM crisis, but that was solved by getting on contract pricing and planned allotments. We bought a lot of memory in that period. We have also had our glitches with reject parts dug out of the dumpster because they did not pass screening. I myself pulled HDDs from the dumpster because a storage system fell over and they scrapped the whole thing, but I used them and did not sell them. Other people would have sold large volumes of dumpster dives. Those things were short lived, not an industry. We also had the big capacitor disasters, the encapsulation issue, the not really Tin free fiasco, the acidic no lead flux, and so on. These were also opportunities for scammers, but these were not enduring challenges across the whole supply base. They were isolated problems. The first enduring fake part scam I know of was CPUs. Faking a CPU was a lot more profitable back then than faking a 100uF Nichicon. And here is where we come to the issue I am addressing: it is not just CPUs, but capacitors, simple diodes, jellybean transistors, … everything is suspect now. Some of the better known distributors are even scammed on occasion as they buy stock from other distributors. Anything that is not a top brand is pretty much guaranteed to be a lie. 60A? Yeah, right…. It is not just a trick, or a lie; it is theft. Many products are named similar to a brand just to trick the weary eyed buyer into thinking they are getting the right item. The Chinese company I worked for purposely named features of their products to sound like features of their competitor, even though they 100% knew that their feature was not even close to the competitor’s and that the customer will be misled. They are thieves, so I am out. The biggest problem is that brand items cannot be trusted to be from a brand unless bought directly or via a few good distributors. If I see onsemi, I should get onsemi, and if I don’t then everyone in the whole supply chain needs to pay dearly for their grift. You can call it a 74LS74, but don’t put TI on it if you are not Texas Instruments (although, TI parts are usually shipped from China, so maybe the TI rejects are really TI…). If you do, it is a theft - Theft from TI; theft from my customer; and an attempt to murder me. Yes murder - My livelihood is from my job. That is how I eat. That is how my family lives. If you screw with my job, I take it very personally. If someone’s lie could cost someone’s life, how should we see this issue? If aircraft fall from the sky because a vendor lied, then prison is not severe enough for them. We are too casual and accepting of this stuff, like it is normal - this should _not_ be ever considered normal. As you can tell, I am thoroughly pissed by these fake parts and specmanship lies. I said I have had my limit. If anyone suggests putting Amazon out of business for the next copycat items they sell, I am all for it. If anyone suggests cutting all trade with China until they enforce brand protection, I am all for it. I don’t normally buy parts like SSRs from Amazon, because I have direct accounts with most of my major part manufacturers and buy those parts in the thousands, and the rest pretty much exclusively from Mouser and Future, but it happens when I am stupid enough to take the chance and I can’t find it in stock. But even if I buy a WiHa screwdriver, or an OEM sensor for my car, or a bottle of Dawn detergent, I expect to get the brand I ordered, not a cheap, lookalike, knock-off piece of garbage. Working for a Chinese high tech company (US$110B per year) and seeing firsthand how they think and operate, how much they think lying is just a joke and deceiving others is the consumer’s problem, and how easily people fall for this crap while they laugh about it, has really changed my mind about this whole fake product problem.
KC
2024-04-03 03:44:18 +0000 UTCAre the threaded screw terminals soldered to the board 'silvered' copper or aluminum? If aluminum may we have a demo of successfully soldering aluminum to a PCB pad?
Pete Bronlund
2024-04-03 03:02:13 +0000 UTCFor those interested in the finer points of SSR vs EM relays, this article I tripped over is a very practical and instructive expose' of the up/downsides of various relay topologies. And from an unexpected origin. https://sound-au.com/articles/hybrid-relays.htm I have designed into product, several times, the use of back-back MOSFET AC relays. Within limits, I find this topology to be more reliable (and efficient) than SCR/TRIAC types for several reasons - some of which are described in the above article. If you want the MAIN tip I can give you folks... Always use trailing edge (MOSFET) AC dimmers in your home to control LED lighting.
Jim Parr
2024-04-03 02:46:03 +0000 UTCPlease, please tell us you'll be using thermal paste on the SSRs when you do your final build. I used to repair large three-phase UPS system in my younger days, and whenever we replaced IGBTs, we'd clean and re-paste the IGBT heat sinks.
Scott Wolf
2024-04-03 01:59:58 +0000 UTCWhy am I not surprised that they over rate their sh* arg humm product? Been tearing stuff apart for gigle when ever it fail for decades. ùùof course been able to salvage or even fix a lot of stuff. TV,s are the best to fix for cheap. got a 4K Sony for free just because it was shutting down after 3 hrs of playing then it would not last more than 15 minute at a time.. just cheap dried out thermal paste on the main processor heat sink was the cause.. some heat pad left from a computer build up did the trick. now using it for my ham shack.
Pierre Martel
2024-04-03 01:29:08 +0000 UTCAs Mr. Carlson undoubtedly knows, counterfeiting is a fact of life in the electronics industry. Even military aircraft have fallen from the sky because of poor due diligence in sourcing. Further, at the base silicon level, I have been caught unawares on several occasions. The first - when several hundred 74LS374's turned out to be 74LS373's with a 374 marking. Valid local component distributor. This was about 1985. Supplier acknowledged the problem and carried the cost of replacing all devices. So even back then counterfeit silicon was becoming a problem. Then, about 2001, about 20,000 32Kbyte high-speed SRAM were used in a large screen LED tile product. Bit flipping and other arcane symptoms eventually turned out to be ingress of moisture due to poor storage technique by supplier's warehouse and my face was red when a visiting local silicon supplier discovered - within seconds - the reason for the problem - date code on the parts was beyond practical use-by date. Instead of baking the boards, we changed all the memory - big job. The last occasion for me was a doozy - about 10 years ago. A batch of 500 LTC3630 SMPS chips were delivered (as part of a sourcing kit from one 3'rd party - reputable - supplier) and loaded to the pilot run of a product. None of them worked. I determined the parts certainly exhibited some properties consistent with the real-deal. So it is evident they began their journey to us by emerging from the BACK DOOR of the factory (out of the 'defective' bin). The supplier came to the party and sourced kosher parts. We replaced all of the batch. The successful product is still being manufactured. I am, (now retired) Electronics Design Engineer.
Jim Parr
2024-04-03 01:15:02 +0000 UTCI had purchased 10 very similar looking SSRs for controlling some compact fluorescent pot type lights in a banquet hall
Robert Bos
2024-04-03 00:55:19 +0000 UTCExcellent teardown Mr Carlson. I use a very similar module to ring my 15VAC doorbell from my home automation system.
Michael Carey
2024-04-02 22:50:43 +0000 UTCWe use both SSR's and mechanical relays...really for AC motors a mechanical relay can work just fine for years (or decades depending on number of cycles), especially anything with a hard start situation. No heat sinks required BUT they do need replacing now and then. SSR's work well for resistive loads like your heaters. I wouldn't waste time trying to re-design the wheel - The off the shelf SSR's are plentiful, come with safety specs (as long as you get the real SSR's) and are generally pretty economical vs trying to build your own.
John Anderson
2024-04-02 22:24:55 +0000 UTCYES, Mr Carlson ReDesign Anything is always a yes.
Tobbe Gustafsson
2024-04-02 22:11:29 +0000 UTCAhhhh yes, China's best,again.
Tom Harris
2024-04-02 21:29:19 +0000 UTCFortunately, there were never any actual flames, but the uncontrolled heat literally melted the machines.
Fabrizio D
2024-04-02 21:18:50 +0000 UTCFire?
Bob Miller
2024-04-02 21:01:53 +0000 UTCI too bought one of these off Amazon and when I got around to using it,it was stuck ‘on’. Lesson learnt. Check as soon as possible that these even work.
Simon York
2024-04-02 20:45:11 +0000 UTCA nice teardown. It contains real gin-you-wine components.
Frank
2024-04-02 20:24:35 +0000 UTCNicely done Mr. Carlson!
Kurt Hermann
2024-04-02 20:22:41 +0000 UTCGood stuff. I appreciate you sacrificing one of your ssr's for analysis. You might be surprised with how good of an inductor a heating element can be.
Matt Cawrse
2024-04-02 19:45:32 +0000 UTCWhen I worked for a Chinese company, they called products like this their “Stupid American IQ test”. They think it is a big joke to sell a 40A component as a 60A, or some other fake, and we buy it. They laugh all the way to the bank. I bought an item recently from Amazon that was clearly a fake. I needed it quickly or I would have gotten it from Mouser - Amazon’s delivery was overnight. It claimed to be made by a first-class manufacturer and had lots of reviews. I ended up having to buy it from Mouser, suffer the delay and angry customer, pay the overnight shipping, etc. When the legit items came, they were clearly different, markings, finish, packaging, and performance. I was rather irritated, so instead of just returning the fake, I looked into legal action. Basically, I found out there was nothing I could do about it and Amazon was no help at all except to refund me. They let me keep the fake, because the seller disappeared. I have bought a lot of misrepresented stuff online, and I am really at my limit on it. Buying a 60A part hoping to get 20A does not do it for me. It either is to spec or it is trash, and I don’t have time to waste redesigning to accommodate a scammer. Since I do electronic design as a career (for >35 years) this sort of thing hits me where I eat, and I really hope we find a way to stop it. I guess a first step you could take is to put all the parts from the one you took apart and return it to Amazon to get your money back. 🤔
KC
2024-04-02 18:52:00 +0000 UTCI allway watch your video and you make it so interresting. A project with SSR would be interresting to also be able to be control with RF module like ESp32
André Champagne
2024-04-02 17:01:17 +0000 UTCI would like to see a redesign of the SSR device, perhaps incorporating components that would actually be rated over the 60A rating. I have used several of these specific SSR's without trouble, although they are not being anywhere close to their rated power.
Glenn Kingdon
2024-04-02 16:55:40 +0000 UTCIt seems like a waste of time to modify these SSRs, unless you are doing it for a learning experience. The SSR has a CE mark, but it is likely that it is counterfeit as well. I have gone through the process for getting CE, FM, UL and other approvals. They are expensive and time consuming and I doubt that these devices meet the requirements. Notice that there are no UL, FM or CSA approvals which are the standard approvals for the north American markets. If you want a reliable quality SSR Sensata-Crydom (one of the first manufacturers), International Rectifier, E-T-A and Carlo Gavazzi have been producing SSRs for years and they are some of the market leaders. Also, GE, Galco, Celduc, and Crouzet are some of the newer manufacturers of quality SSRs. You will pay more for SSRs from these companies, but they are likely to be better quality. Large distributers like Arrow, Avnet, Mouser, Digikey, Newark, RS Group; to name a few of the larger ones, have screening processes which try to eliminate counterfeit parts from the supply chain. Counterfeit parts have cost the industry millions and millions of dollars. Mr. Carlson has a video about counterfeit parts that is worth watching.
Paul Rawlings
2024-04-02 16:51:38 +0000 UTCHi Paul, I would absolutely like to see you design a solid state relay! It would make another excellent learning project.
Bill Hanks
2024-04-02 16:30:35 +0000 UTCTwice, this component failed in one of my industrial 3D printers, leading to the complete destruction of the machine both times. The software protection system had a massive bug. It's now in the past, but a two-euro component caused unimaginable damage.
Fabrizio D
2024-04-02 16:22:43 +0000 UTCPaul, I'd like to see how you might modify/redesign these fake SSRs.
Bob Vines
2024-04-02 16:17:28 +0000 UTCThese may be the (clone) FOTEK SSD-60. Notice the Q on the O on the sticker.
Robert McDermott
2024-04-02 16:13:38 +0000 UTCPaul: when I saw the original video, I thought "Made in china" (lower case) on the label made it a bit sus, but figured you would have avoided it if it wasn't legit. But, then again, perhaps you had a "master plan" to teach us all along? 8-)
Jim H
2024-04-02 16:13:01 +0000 UTCWow. Add this to the reasons to appropriately apply engineering derating to designs. Always derate, especially with parts from unauthorized distributors and/or questionable products. SSRs are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get!
Elliott Liggett
2024-04-02 15:56:27 +0000 UTCCool design!
Kenny Fidler
2024-04-02 15:38:24 +0000 UTC
