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 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.
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.
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!
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!
I mean, just carry a small roll of it, not one that’s like an inch or two wide…
…or one or more layers of nail polish.
Do this and never look back
May the LED’s I tape not light the way
I have a black pen that can write on plastic. I’ve used that to dim the insanely bright LED on a smoke detector. If you are careful (I wasn’t) then this method looks nicer than putting some tape on a device.
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!
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.
Hell yes me too. And it was the top comment.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Might be some solace in the near future. Pixel Light is becoming a thing, where the car will selectively black out part of the headlight beam for oncoming traffic.
I work in IT, LEDs are useful for diagnostics.
Why blue? No idea.
Who asked for this? Nobody, as far as I can tell… They just switched, and didn’t ask anyone for an opinion on it.
Why so bright? Because modern LEDs are generally pretty darn bright… When these are used as an indicator instead of an actual light source, I’m scratching my head just as much as you are. I’m immune to the light problem when sleeping; I understand some have that problem, but it’s not me. Generally I’m unbothered by device LEDs, but I’m not the majority. I’d rather go back to the old, barely visible LEDs used on 386 computers, they did the job and didn’t burn a hole in your retina doing it.
Blue LEDs used to be super expensive. Therefore, only high end electronics had them. So once LEDs got dirt cheap, everybody started dropping blue LEDs on everything to capture that “premium” feel.
Now of course, it’s just obnoxious
I mean green means good, red means bad. So a blue LED might be “something is happening” thing
I have an old Samsung screen, which has a bright blue LED when it’s working. So far, so good. If you turn off your PC, the same blue LED starts to blink. Looks like you get raided by the police. How can anybody think it is a good idea to have a blinking LED for a device that isn’t used?
I have a similar screen. Can’t you just turn it off?
I think I had a similar one.
You can turn it off, but then you have to turn it back on again when you turn on your PC. Would be nice if it just didn’t keep blinking in the standby mode, which is what I mostly leave my screens on when they’re not in use.
I could - but I’m lazy. I bought a master/slave power bar that removes power to the screen when the PC is shut down.
Or tape over it instead. Even if it’s one of the ones with touch controls, tape should be thin enough that it wouldn’t really cause problems.
I am just turning off the entire power strip because of these blue blinking LEDs…
I have this exact same monitor (also Samsung) it is driving me nuts, I have VERY poor vision making the light at night shine 500x brighter, I’ve contemplated putting a sticker on it
Obviously you need that idle indicator light to give off more lumens than a 2D Maglite all night long right?
How else would I know the power strip was on? It’s not like it’s charging my phone and powering the fan, if it didn’t light the room up I would obviously shove forks into the sockets because that’s something I regularly do in my spare time
Those bright LED interfaces are called “Abusive Appliance Interfaces” by Nathan over on the Toasty Tech website. It seems like there’s more people that are being annoyed by the bright lights than I thought.
I just bought a new Magsafe charger. Something that generally lives in someone’s bedroom shouldn’t have the brightest fucking blue light I’ve ever seen on it. But it does.
Took one night to cover that fucker with electrical tape.
Also, why are most chargers black? They live on a wall. Nobody has a black wall.
You can buy a white Samsung Galaxy, which comes with a white cable. But the charger, for this phone, is only available in black.
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.
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.
I think it’s a cost thing. It’s cheaper to get these blue LEDs than the old, dimmer green ones, so they buy these instead and change nothing else. It would cost money to change the resistor value, so they don’t bother. Instead they take the same boad, stick the new LED on it, and ship it that way.
I could see that being the case for some things, at least in cases where it is an older design being updated or VE’d. Perhaps some sourcing person changes the LED part number on the AVL and forgets to check with engineering whether the resistor value which goes with it is a sane level of brightness still.
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.
Search for “blackout tape” or “dimming tape” and you’ll find dark sticky tape in different degrees of transparency that you can use to dull or block these annoying kinds of lights. I learned about it through my wife, whose sleep is easily disturbed.
You shouldn’t have to buy this and make the effort, but I’m trying to make a practical suggestion.
My thing is unnecessary beeps. It feels like every damn thing in the world goes beep and it drives me wild.
I have a bottle of black nail polish. Every LED in my bedroom (except the smoke detector) is blacked out.
This. I use white nail polish so that I can still let some light through. It’s a great dimmer.
100% agree. I have tape over the lights on my PS5 to keep my room dark at night. Plus I turn all my monitors off…and sometimes put something over my router to cover up all those blinking lights…and the Oculus Quest charging light…
I was so happy when I saw my router had an option to disable all the lights (minus the power light).
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.
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.
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!
That’s why I feel old. I don’t want case windows, or RGB. It’s all about the framerate and the score.
But, are you old enough to want a turbo button and LED on your case?
I hate the window, too. Why build a case with aluminium, then add a huge glass window heavier than a full steel case?
Right? Sure, keyboards with backlit keys are nice, and why not have them colorful? But pls don’t try to sell me RGB RAM
Yeah, my PC case came with a bunch of rgb fans. Hate them, but I didn’t want to buy more fans just to get rid of the rgb.
If you ever need new ones, and you have a bit of space, the phanteks t30 fans kick ass. They are slightly thicker than normal fans, which means they move more air while being quiet. Best of all, no RGB.
Ah, would be wonderful to get this nightclub out of my living room. I’ll check those out, thanks.
My hunch is it’s to stand out in influencer videos for a shot at viral marketing.
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.
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!
It’s almost like rainbows are recognisable, cover a wide spectrum of colours and are the natural choice for a device that advertises its RGB capabilities. But yeah, it’s probably the gays or whatever.
They’re turning the frickin RAM gay!
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.
