Slashdot Mirror
The Blues for LEDs
Corey Burger writes "Seems somebody rolled out of bed on the wrong side today. The Globe and Mail's Ian Johnson delivers up a rant about the ubiquity of the new blue LEDs."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
"Ricer" refers to the "moding" of "import" cars for looks and zero performance gain. I believe there are be far more derogatory words one could use to insult on of asian decent.
From the Urban Dictionary:
Usually some 17-21 year old male with heavily modified "externals", "posing" in some Honda (typically a civic), giving a bad name to those real tuners who drive fast Hondas!
>2. Turn the device with the LED off.
>3. Drill the shit out of the LED*
4. Turn the device back on, and find out if the LED was actually part of an important circuit as well as being an indicator.
Alternate step 3: Use black electrical tape to cover the LED. Peel it back off when you're taking the eBay photos a couple years from now.
Even better:
1. Disassemble device
2. Locate offending LED
3. Apply heat (solder iron) and remove LED
4. If so desired, replace it with an LED of different color using the solder iron and resin.
5. Reassemble device
$cat
Paint works well too...
Even a sharpie marker..
Choose a blue color and you can still have your light, at a reduced amount of luminosity..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There really are alarms like that, I had a brief stay at a nuclear plant that beeped constantly.
The theory is if an alarm fails it might not go off, but if it beeps constantly then you will notice if it fails.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
4a. Replace corresponding series resistor.
Blue LEDs typically have a forward voltage greater than standard red/green/yellow ones. If you don't use a correctly-calculated series resistor, a lower voltage LED will receive more current and become a super-high-tech Black LED shortly after powerup.
I got an M-Audio Firewire 410 soundcard and the blue LED was beyond obnoxious. It was MUCH brighter than the red and green LEDs on the thing, by several times. Since it is the power LED, it was ALWAYS on. Also, if you powered the unit down, but left it connected to Firewire, it would proceed to blink at you, very frequently. I had put a peice of masking tape over it to dampen the light (and I could still see it through that). Finally, however, it just broke, and I'm not sending it in for service.
It's not the use of blue LEDs that bothers me, it's how damn bright most of them are. An indicator that my gear is turned on is nice. An indicator that my gear is turned on that I can see from outside at night (makes the room glow blue) is more than just a bit of overkill.
They sell pants under their own brand called Member's Mark. They are nice, plain, dark blue jeans. They are also well made and like $13/pair.
4. If so desired, replace it with an LED of different color using the solder iron and resin.
And watch your new LED smoulder after a while. Blue LEDs trigger at 3.2 volts as compared to 0.7 volts for red and green LEDs. You also need to place a larger resistance in series with it, which is at best hardto do on a PCB that wasn't designed for it.
I vague recall seeing LEDs with curren-limiting resistances built in though somewhere, so make sure you use one of those.
The color, though, is correct. The standard NEMA rules for indicator colors, used on industrial gear for decades, are
-
GREEN Normal status.
-
AMBER Abnormal status. Operator should be aware that an amber lamp is lit.
-
RED Trouble status. Operator should take action to make the red light go out.
-
BLUE or WHITE On, or other non-specific meaning.
So blue and white are actually the default colors. Red should be used only for trouble indicators. We're still getting over the cheap red LED glut of the 1980s, when everything had red LEDs.Anything that rackmounts should follow these rules. It's not only annoying, but a headache, to have red lights for non-trouble conditions in a rack of equipment. IBM always has.