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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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[-] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] sndrtj@feddit.nl 5 points 1 year ago

I love lemmy for bringing back the old informative internet like this comment.

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[-] brad@toad.work 31 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] c2h6@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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!

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[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago

Electrical tape to black it out.

Painters tape to dim it.

[-] Russianranger@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Sarcastik@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I literally travel with a roll of black electric tape for this exact reason.

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[-] aeharding@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays

[-] Breno@lemmy.fmhy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

People driving around like they're trying to spot kangaroos in the suburbs

[-] i_am_hiding@aussie.zone 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] VenomsCarnage22@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Agreed. I can't tell when people are driving with their high beams on anymore.

[-] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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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[-] kring@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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?

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[-] fraydabson@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] mtnwolf@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can't tell anyone this

My friend, you just told the entire internet.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Jalopp@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I have a bottle of black nail polish. Every LED in my bedroom (except the smoke detector) is blacked out.

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[-] SageWaterDragon@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] tomthegeek@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] nicerdicer@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] oryx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] ofk12@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Absolutely boils my piss because it's so unnecessary

[-] Veraxis@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Tag365@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] eva_sieve@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

sorry, it's the future, these are apparently mandatory now.

[-] Pazintach@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To find a computer part that doesn't come with lights on it is getting harder. Even parts buried within the case have lights. How I want to destroy those LED lights on my motherboard.

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[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] kroy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] Willer@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

fun fact: human eyes can actually perceive single photons.

also fun fact: we can shoot single photons.

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[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

There's a lot of value in a sleeping area that can get really really dark.

I'm ever so grateful for electrical tape.

[-] Hurtreynolds90@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago

I appreciate this sentiment, but I kinda dig the LEDs. We just ordered bookshelves that have them installed, and I'm kinda giddy about reading books while be illuminated from the home of the books, lol.

I'm an excessive kinda guy.

[-] PlushySD@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Off-topic but the other day someone just complained that he's missing LEDs on his mobile phone LoL

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[-] beardsley@midwest.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I hate these, too. I decided to put a compact computer in our bedroom (already a bad plan, I know) to quickly check the security camera at night (I rolled my own, no phone app). I plugged in a mouse I had laying around. I discovered the first night when this particular mouse does not have its custom drivers installed (gimme a break, this is Raspbian not Windows!), it freaking blinks, and in the dead of night it's as bright as a flashlight. Blink. Blink. All night long. I never noticed before because, wackily enough, I rarely compute in complete darkness.

I also have a USB desk fan I thought I might run at night and yes, it has blinky lights when charging. F that, I bought an old Caframo Dragonfly instead... best compact fan ever made, first produced in the 1950s.

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[-] JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] beibiddybibo@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I finally gave up and just started sleeping with a mask over my eyes. I can't stand to have any light at all, either.

[-] peto@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Man I feel you. Sometimes I tape over things even in rooms in only in when there are lights on because it comes with an indicator brighter than a thousand suns.

I miss those old low grade red ones. It also just looks better on black cases.

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[-] serpineslair@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] bsides@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I don’t know where you live but I’m very afraid that start happening here in Brazil too. It’s showing a lot of this already and it’s very annoying. Thanks for the tip about the tape, I don’t know that and will look for it.

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[-] busturn@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] exploding_whale@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Obviously you need that idle indicator light to give off more lumens than a 2D Maglite all night long right?

[-] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

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

[-] meyotch@lemmy.mitchday.com 5 points 1 year ago

I purchased a black paint marker. When I get new electronics, I turn off the lights at night and all eye-offenders get the hose.

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[-] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

I recently bought new USB-C cables to use on my nightstand and when they arrived I saw they have an LED ring with a flowing rainbow pattern. Are you kidding me? Just why.

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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
396 points (97.8% liked)

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