Comment by dougg3
I'm the author of this article and you're absolutely correct! This was a long, drawn-out project. For some context, I ordered the replacement regulators in February. The new LED driver chips were ordered in March, so that was around the time that I actually had the failed hardware fixed. Then everything sat idle for months. The firmware reverse engineering to figure out the LEDs was several weeks of on and off work in my spare time.
This type of thing is definitely not something you can just figure out in a couple hours (or even days).
Your writeup is inspiring.
I most appreciate the honesty about mistakes and failures and dead-ends. Too often wasted effort and small failures are elided from articles and instead you get something that is written retrospectively as though everything went perfectly...