My first post here, please keep in mind that I hardly know anything about electrical engineering so please keep any replies in layman terms, thank you!
I bought this 30cm white LED strip.
It's set up to run from 12 volts. The thing is I would like to use it at 6 volts. I can see that there are soldered IC chips on it: an M7 chip and a 78L05 chip; from what I could find out the 78L05 chip is a voltage regulator.
What would be the simplest way to get this to run from 6V?
To save the hassle of trying to modify a device to take a different voltage, I would personally consider using a "step-up" or a boost DC-to-DC converter to simply provide the required voltage.
One like this boost converter from eBay would be able to take in 6 volts and supply 12 volts on its output.
Your eBay listing did not provide amperage/power requirements, but the ~10 watts this provides should be enough
The M7 and 78L05 form a 5V power supply. If your 6V is well regulated you could try putting a diode from input to output of the 78L05, shunting it out of the circuit.
That will reduce the 6V input to a bit less than 5V. However if your 6V supply is 'dirty', badly regulated etc. (or if I miss-guessed the schematic) you could burn out the microcontroller and your gadget will be trash.
If you're prepared to take that risk, you can give it a try.
Edit: This is for 6VDC- the OP has revised to 6VAC so this is not useful answer, see comment below.
If you plug it into anything more than about 6.5V (including the 12V it was originally designed for) it could be destroyed- would definitely be destroyed at 12V.
