Mildly Infuriating

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.

Electrical tape to black it out.

Painters tape to dim it.

Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays

fun fact: human eyes can actually perceive single photons.

also fun fact: we can shoot single photons.

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 have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.

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

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??

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.

It's so "Big Brother" can still watch you....?! 😅

Bluetack is your friend. The constant red light on our baby monitor was too distracting in the pitch blackness of the night that it kept my kids awake. A small amount of Bluetack and this problem is solved. Not asthectically pleasing but a good option.

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.

I can understand for things that don't look obviously on, but a fan? C'mon. If the fan starts spinning, I know it's working. I don't need a light telling me it's on.

A soldiering iron comes in handy.

I just remove annoying leds altogether.

I miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that's passed.

I used to work in electronics manufacturing. I won't give my title because it was a shit title and didn't describe what I did well at all. I think that was on purpose to keep our salaries low.

I engineered final assembly test systems. Like the product fully completed. Most of these devices were commercial in nature.

My man, the testers fucking LOVED LEDs. Because LEDs not turning on correctly always means the device fails.

I hated them, because was really fucking hard to automate testing of LEDs. LEDs emit a wavelength, or combination of RGB. Because of the brilliance of my sales engineers, we used computer vision to automate this testing, NOT sensors. The reasoning? Much denser LED placements.

But guess what happens when your supply chain and manufacutirng is entirely Chinese and your product is designed and prototyped and originally manufactured here? YOU GET THE WRONG FUCKING COLOR CALIBRATED. I'm not shitting you, it was a tiny difference in Red wavelength. Tiny. but computer vision doesn't read wave length, it reads color.

LEDs make testing easy for humans. If you just need to see them light up? Everything is great. Bonus points for brighter LEDs for faster moving tests. Faster moving tests = more profit. Human testers means you don't spend money on automated testing and and can quickly repurpose humans to see if an LED is on.

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?

The gradual spread of light pollution has gotten crazy, and people still don't really notice it. We're at the point that it's actually driving insects to extinction. If you look somewhere rural vs. urban the difference in what constitutes "night" is mindblowing, and rural areas are getting brighter all the time themselves.

You must be buying crap. I have lots and lots of electronic devices, flashlights too and the indicator lights on the vast majority of them aren't as bright as you're saying.

You might have some kind of problem with your eye sight.

Yah agree with your rant but black electric tape was my solution too.

Alec Watson enters the chat