Why does every small appliance or useful home electronics item have the BRIGHTEST LEDs in them?
I bought a new fan for our bedroom Sunday. It has 4 speed settings, and LEDs to display which setting you’re on.
Just like every other electrical device in our bedroom, I had to cover the LEDs with electrical tape because they are TOO DAMM BRIGHT. That one light was more than bright enough for me to see in the room with all the lights off.
I can’t sleep well if there’s a lot of light like that, especially blue light, and it’s like every fucking electronics manufacturer used the same extra bright blue LEDs.
All of our power strips have them. Same brightness.
The fans have them.
Don’t even get me started on digital clocks and the plague of bright LEDs that they bring about
Many charging plugs have them built into the plug itself.
Even some fucking light switches have them now!
I have about 6 different things in our bedroom that have electrical tape over their completely unnecessary LEDs.
Why has this become such a common thing? Is this really something most people want? To have a room that is never actually dark even with the lights turned off?
I get to be that guy! I’m so excited!
In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They’re cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.
Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.
Hah, this is what I liked the most about reddit - learning random bits of knowledge about things I knew nothing about. I’m glad to see this happen here too!
Hell yes me too. And it was the top comment.
What’s a reddit?
It was a website from the old times of the internet, where people behind pseudonyms could freely discuss links and texts inside thematic communities.
sounds weird
Sounds kind of like usenet…
Better off you never learn.
I don’t know what those things are either, but I’m not into antiques.
This is also why those power strip lights can sometimes flicker in the dark. They are sometimes over-driven for extra brightness; this does cut their lifespan, but they usually still last for many years regardless. However, towards the end of that shortened lifespan, the accumulated damage to the electrodes leads to flickering as it struggles to keep the neon excited. However, incoming photons can give just a little extra nudge, which sometimes is enough to keep the neon excited and glowing.
I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it’s a cheap way to show the state of a system.
The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There’s no specific amount of current that produces light that’s bright enough in a lit room, but isn’t too bright in a dark room.
I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I’m in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won’t think of specifically doing this.
Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.
All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I’ don’t like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there’s a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.
I love lemmy for bringing back the old informative internet like this comment.
A photoresistor would be handy for adjusting indicator led brightness.
Sure – and that’s an easy way to do it. However if I’m going to make it automatic, I like the elegance of using an LED as it’s own sensor for how bright it should be. It also uses up fewer microcontroller pins – for example, I can use pulse width modulation to give the LED a default brightness. Then during the OFF part of the cycle, reconfigure the pin to act as an ADC and make a measurement of the ambient light and adjust the duty cycle as needed.
It’s the kind of optimization I enjoy! Another neat trick is using the watchdog timer and counting CPU cycles to allow really low duty cycles for lights you want to keep very dim, without using a resistor to limit current (you are instead using the IV curve on the datasheet and a little math). I use this plus magnets and coin cells to make little lights I can stick to things to avoid hitting my head on them, usually doorframes (I’m very tall and live in Southeast Asia). They run for 3+ years off the cell, and have configurable brightness!
If the device already has a microcontroller then I agree the “high tech” method is more appealing, while for something like a desk fan I think the analog route might be more elegant or at least more robust.
Yeah know what you mean. However these days I can generally get a microcontroller for a lower price than a cds photo resistor, and with a 100 year expected lifetime – also usually it consumes less power too.
I could do it with a phototransistor more easily than a photo resistor. That would be a solid competitor to using an MCU in terms of cost, performance, and power consumption in a simple system!
Anyway in practice I rarely get to use analog or discrete components professionally. The MCUs are just too damn good.
Good points. I didn’t realize even using a dedicated MCU just for that would be the better option.
This struck me as super weird too. It still ‘feels’ wrong to use a whole CPU instead of a few logic gates or a 555.
It took some getting used to. Maybe soon I’ll dive into the world of one-time-writeable Chinese MCUs (the ones I normally use have rewriteable flash). Those are 9 cents a piece!
If they get any cheaper I’ll start using them as ballast!
Thank you for this informed input :-)
There’s a whole amazing secret world where our devices come from! I’m glad just to have a little window in on it.
Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
The electrical tape approach is what I did and it did wonders. Went from having a myriad of green and blue LEDs on my fans/portable AC/etc to complete wonderful darkness when I retired for the night. Made a distinct difference in my ability to fall asleep faster at night. I hate having lights when going to bed. Darkness or bust.
I literally travel with a roll of black electric tape for this exact reason.
No officer, I use it to cover the lights on electronics in my hotel room. Honest!
…or one or more layers of nail polish.
Do this and never look back
May the LED’s I tape not light the way
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
Agreed. I can’t tell when people are driving with their high beams on anymore.
My pet peeve is not just the brightness, but the blueness. These things are fucking blue raspberry slurpee blue. Paired with a very reddish orange turn signal they come up behind me and indicate and I think I’m getting pulled over for a sec.
deleted by creator
This is why I always have the high beans on when driving my 90’s car. I’ve got to fit in with the cool kids (oh and be able to see the road despite the blinding lights coming at me.)
Not sure if you are joking or not. But at times that’s actually what I think about and sometimes even do. If there is a car with too bright lights coming down the road I’ll turn on the high beams because it reduces my ability to see the road otherwise.
People driving around like they’re trying to spot kangaroos in the suburbs
Especially when they’re in one of those God-ugly American Pickup Trucks with headlights that are right at eye level for anyone in a normal car. Even being followed by a forty year old Mack semi isn’t nearly as bad, because they’ve at least got sealed beam headlights.
“… one of those God-ugly American Pickup Trucks …”
Why’d you say American Pickup Trucks twice?
I kid, but really those things are hideous. The front end looks like a Baleen whale feeding.
Even the auto dimming ones are too much
Depending where you are, the bright bulbs help spot deer. Though if you are in the suburbs that might not be really much of a problem
Electrical tape can be used to black them out.
You can’t tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.
You can’t tell anyone this
My friend, you just told the entire internet.
To find a computer part that doesn’t come with lights on it is getting harder. Even parts buried within the case have lights. How I want to destroy those LED lights on my motherboard.
Put a little paint or tape over the led.
Seeing so many people putting tapes on their LEDs, I’ll do that too!
Check your BIOS/UEFI settings for an option to turn them off.
I’ve checked before I bought it, it’s an MSI Mortar Max. The instruction was misleading, unfortunately, it was my mistake that in the end they can’t be turned off through UEFI.
Absolutely boils my piss because it’s so unnecessary
sorry, it’s the future, these are apparently mandatory now.
it gives you a bit more appreciation devs who add in functionality to turn the LED off. My fan has that which is really nice, and my portable AC. Even my access points you can change them.
But still so many products with LED that cannot be changed or disabled so I have to use a piece of electrical tape.
There’s a lot of value in a sleeping area that can get really really dark.
I’m ever so grateful for electrical tape.
I appreciate this sentiment, but I kinda dig the LEDs. We just ordered bookshelves that have them installed, and I’m kinda giddy about reading books while be illuminated from the home of the books, lol.
I’m an excessive kinda guy.
Off-topic but the other day someone just complained that he’s missing LEDs on his mobile phone LoL
Well THIS is true.
Yeah. Not all that useful when people have always on displays.
I finally gave up and just started sleeping with a mask over my eyes. I can’t stand to have any light at all, either.
I hate these, too. I decided to put a compact computer in our bedroom (already a bad plan, I know) to quickly check the security camera at night (I rolled my own, no phone app). I plugged in a mouse I had laying around. I discovered the first night when this particular mouse does not have its custom drivers installed (gimme a break, this is Raspbian not Windows!), it freaking blinks, and in the dead of night it’s as bright as a flashlight. Blink. Blink. All night long. I never noticed before because, wackily enough, I rarely compute in complete darkness.
It may just be the weed, but for a moment I thought I was reading something off a Night City public BBS.
I don’t know where you live but I’m very afraid that start happening here in Brazil too. It’s showing a lot of this already and it’s very annoying. Thanks for the tip about the tape, I don’t know that and will look for it.
You can also use a dark nail polish if you don’t want tape covering everything.