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?
Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
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.
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
Because they’re cheap and look “modern/futuristic” so shit manufacturers love them. I have also used electrical tape on power strips, chargers, smoke detectors, etc
Agree. When my DVD player back in 2000 came with a bright blue power-on LED, that crap started to bother me. Sitting right under the TV, so watching anything in a darkened room means I had that fucker blinding me all the time. Nothing a little duct tape can’t fix, but that’s not exactly helping.
Ever since I’ve been actively avoiding devices where I can’t dim & disable the LEDs.
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!
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.
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?
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’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!
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!
This ain’t it.
Major yikes right here
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.
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 miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that’s passed.
I don’t know if this is the right place to complain about this but since it’s LED related… Why are all the automakers putting the brightest fucking LED’s in their new vehicles now?? They are legit brighter then how high beams used to be only a few years back!!
What did we all used to do when headlights used to be slightly yellow??
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.
Next level pro-tip: Use a “dot” or dab of dark nail polish to tone down the intensity. It’s more permanent than the tape method but will allow you to see if the LED is on or off so doesn’t remove functionality.
Black electrical tape is usually pretty long-lasting in my book, but nail polish sounds like a good idea too given that it dries pretty quickly
I have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.
I have a lamp and that has an LED that is on all the time.
Why would a lamp have a permanently on LED? That’s what I get for getting cheap crap from China, rather than premium crap from China.
I prefer midrange crap from China
I don’t seem to find it mentioned: LEDs at night are terrible for your sleep, especially the blue ones. Among other things they suppress the melatonin release.
An article that goes into more detail and provides a citations for further research.
Yep, its part of why this drives me crazy. I notice a big difference in my sleep when I’m in, say, a hotel that has any of these LEDs in it.
It’s hard to find a PC case that doesn’t look like a disco.
You actually have to pay a premium to avoid lightshow pc hardware nowadays. If i had to guess, someone over at marketing for these companies figured out that people who want blacked out hardware skew older or professional and are willing to pay.
Pretty much. I was actually purchasing a computer build and it was cheaper to give the build a cohesive RGB look. The main thing jacking the price up was the RAM. The RGB RAM was cheaper to get than the non-RGB one.
I don’t think RGB would be that bad as an aesthetic choice if all the companies actually stuck to one standard like how we have SATA, USB, etc., but they don’t. Most of my RGB components are from Corsair so it’s not a huge problem as iCUE can control it, but if you’ve got different vendors and/or you use Linux, it’s trickier. This is what OpenRGB is trying to solve, and what Level1Tech and Gamer’s Nexus are trying to sort out with OpenPleb.
OpenPleb is such a good initiative. It would be so helpful to have documentation and standards here.
Or you can just not plug in the LEDs :P
Most of them you don’t have a choice. There are fans that light up when the fan has any power at all. Motherboards have integrated lights. GPUs have internal LEDs…
Sure, you could desolder some of them, but that’s harder.
