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?
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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…
Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
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!
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.
Do this and never look back
May the LED’s I tape not light the way
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
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
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.
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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.
Electrical tape can be used to black them out.
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.
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.
I’m a bit late and maybe someone already mentioned it, but go onto amazon and order the cheapest darkest car window tinting film. I have it on all of my leds and it makes it a lot more bearable.
I am so happy with my new keyboard in every way apart from the fact that the num pad light etc. is blue and SO BRIGHT to the point where it is almost blinding to look at directly from above, and it lights up my ceiling blue at night, like pointing a torch. I guess it’s a sign of quality or whatever but I think it is a tad unnecessary to be that bright. I may end up covering it with a few layers of transparent/tinted tape.
I like the customizable LEDs on my razer mouse mat, except when my PC (2021 15.6-inch razer laptop) decides that since I just went 6 hours without installing what are now almost daily win10 patches, it’s time to fuck up my drivers- and then it exits sleep mode despite the lid being closed and there being nothing wrong with my power settings, causing my fans to jet-engine, the logo led thing to come on and the mouse mat to shine brighter than a sun with its default color-cycle thing. And for bonus points, sometimes it even tries to address the problem by actually auto-updating at the time I told it to (1 AM or something), so I get startled by the “du dun, duh dun doooooo” which always seems louder at night.
And I dare not switch to linux, as razer laptops are not a common laptop choice and therefore it’s unclear how I’d be able to keep all its complicated and already-buggy drivers and proprietary software up to date so they don’t make it overheat within the first week, especially since the odds of me finding any help online for converting such an exotic rig to ubuntu are minimal to none.
if you can, try finding a sleep mode setting in your BIOS and change it to Linux or S3 oe whatever else that blasted contraption throws up for you
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I built my first PC in a Bitfenix Prodigy. The blue LEDs they used for the power and HDD activity lights were brighter than a thousand suns. I ended up disconnecting them.
I put electrical tape over all of them. They’re unnecessary, they’re annoying.
I tried my best to build a new computer without any LEDs and I couldn’t. So now I just keep a piece of cardboard in front of my glass case side so I don’t have to look at that bullshit.
Yeah, yeah, it probably causes it to run hotter. I’ll take a little more heat, less performance, and possibly shorter overall component life over having to deal with those stupid lights.
I have a similar complaint about almost all “gamer gear” having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I’m not even opposed to the “gamer” aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it’s time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what’s going on.
I’ve never liked the RGB thing. Sometimes it can look good (when they’re all set to one color that matches the rest of the build), but 99% of them look tacky. Whenever I get around to building a PC finally, I’m gonna try to have zero LEDs in there. Just something nice and simple and clean.
Here’s some insightful view into the topic of gamer aesthetics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgOI4908QyY
The video is in German, but you can toggle the subtitles into (auto-generated) English.
Thanks!
Buying RAM recently and people are reviewing the fucking RGB instead of the performance. Like, WTF are you doing with your life? I managed to find some without gratuitous lighting effects thankfully.
Right? Sure, keyboards with backlit keys are nice, and why not have them colorful? But pls don’t try to sell me RGB RAM
That’s why I feel old. I don’t want case windows, or RGB. It’s all about the framerate and the score.
I guess they think all gamers are really into LGBTQ+ stuff, since everything gets rainbow lighting. It’s a bit odd, since that seems to be more sysadmins than gamers, but both demographics are into building computers so I guess it overlaps enough.
A new joy of using Lemmy: being able to actually see how many downvotes a comment got. It’s been so long since Reddit tossed that feature that I forgot how much I missed it.
It goes even deeper! Sir Isaac Newton only discovered the visible light spectrum to push the gay agenda. And you ever notice how there were a lot fewer queer folks when movies were in black and white? You can thank the liberal Jewish media for that. It’s pedophiles all the way down!
sorry, it’s the future, these are apparently mandatory now.
I usually end up blocking them all with permanent marker. They’re damn irritating.
Electrical engineer here who also does hobby projects. I’m with you. I think some of the reason may be that modern GaN-type green or blue LEDs are absurdly efficient, so only a couple mA of drive current is enough to make them insanely bright.
When I build LEDs into my projects, for a simple indicator light, I might run them at maybe only a tenth of a milliamp and still get ample brightness to tell whether it is on or not in a lit room. Giving them the full rated 10 or 20mA would be blindingly bright. I also usually design most things with a hard on/off switch so they can be turned all the way off when not in use.
Of things I own normally I also have two power strips with absurdly bright LEDs to indicate the surge protection. It lights up my whole living room with the lights off. If I had to have something like that in my bedroom, I would probably open it up and disconnect the LEDs in some way, or maybe modify the resistor values to run at the lowest current I could get away with.
I feel like designers have lost sight of the fact that these lights are meant to be indicators only-- i.e. a subtle indication of the status of something and not trying to light a room-- and yet they default to driving them at full blast as if they were the super dim older-gen LEDs from 20+ years ago.
