OK, so I am modding my psu. Painted the darn thing, changed the top into a plexi one. Cut out a nice design and want to light it up using leds. I supply power via a 5 volt line from my PSU. This is too much for 1 LED, but 2 connected serial should be fine. So I bend the legs, and bend them again, solder the Leds together and test the contraption. Now comes the fun part. It were to extra bright 3mm RED leds. After al my tinkering I ended up with one not so bright WHITE led, and one not so bright BLUE led.... HUhhhhh?????? Don't have a clue what went wrong.... My only guess is that I manipulated the leggs too much so the distance between the diode thingie changed and therefore the colour. But anny comments would be welcome since the little buggers cost me like 4 euro's a piece... and I have 6 more too solder... LOL Oh and not to forget: I sanded them a bit to make the light more difuse. Garbach
Messing with the legs shouldnt mess with the colour. Did you try them before soldering them up? Maybe the company supplied the wrong colour?
No, I did try them out before the final setup in my PSU. They were red alright, and bright too.. now they are neither. Could they have become too hot in the soldering proces, and gotten dammaged that way? Garbach
€4 is a bit steep for a single LED... go to www.lsdiodes.com . Any LED for a flat $.45, and $2 shipping to anywhere in the world. That includes blue, white etc. They hyperbright ones are $.60 each, though.
Thanks for the tip XP... at the rate I'm killing leds this could be a real saver... LOL (I did the suply power to outside mods thingy for a glowpad. Made a nice 12V and a 5V outlet. Gave them the same size jackplugs.... Promptly connected my 5V leds to the 12V outlet an Poooooof.. another 5 LED's off to the big bright led in the sky... ) Garbach
Try using this, LED calculater. You MUST use a resistor on any led, unless the led uses 5v and you have a 5v supply. But better to use 12v and a current limiting resister than just 5v. That would be why you have burnt out so many.. I know cause I have burnt out more than 10... don't wnat to state real amount, and I cant remember... well... ok, more than 20 would be a bit more truthful
<exagaration>you are my savior.. I worship you...</exageration> /me bookmarks... then tries to think of ways to use leds in useless ways... maybe power 50 to 60 in series off the mains lines.. or hook a bunch up in parallel to fry 'em. (for the contest thing for 1000 leds ) Or maybe make a case out of leds, and use clear epoxy to glue em all together. Has anyone tried that yet???
cool... how many people are willing to donate money to me to buy hundreds of leds fro the case I wonder??? EDIT: Actually, I think I may do this.. www.allelectronics.com has leds for like 10 cents a peice I think... must plan this further... should look uber sweet lit up
Your led's would be at least 3v, and it sounds like you connected them in series so 5v / 2 = 2.5V each hence why they're not so bright. dunno bout the colour tho...
The only way you could of changed the color of the led's is if you alter the chemistry of the semiconductor junction. If you over volt a red led, it only gets slightly orange and then dies. White led's are actually blue led's with a phosphorus coating that absorbs some of the blue light and lets it off as other colors. Unless the led has this phosphorus coating, it cannot be white, and only white led's have this coating. The reason for this is that led's can only emit one wavelength (color) of light, white light is and average of all colors of light. What probably happened is you picked up the wrong led's.
You should note that not all LED manufacturers make leds the same way. So it is possible that it was a blue led, with white coating and then a red coating.. if ya know what I meen. <-- sort of but not I have read about two or three different ways of doping the silicon.. but was around a year and a half ago, and I don't have the link. a quick search in google is what I did I beleive.
Well then my testing could have been faulty. I bought like 10 leds (at that insane hight price as I now know (and have ordered some 20 more cheap ondes through LSDiodes) and thought I tested the whole bunch. After this mishap I did test all the 8 remaining LED's more thoroughly: all were red. But if it truely is not possible for a led to change colour then out of those 10 LED's 2 were of the wrong colour and I promptly connected those 2.... I did make a testrun before soldering, but am no longer sure if I used those exact 2 led's... sorry... Ah well... just a short wait till my 20 new bright red friends arive and then off to do some more soldering... and better testing before... Garbach
Whoa, you must be extremely lucky, as blue and white LEDs use entirely different materials than the red ones (GaAlAsP for red vs. SiC or GaN for blue or white), so you have a much better chance of seeing Britney Spears at a LAN party than seeing a red LED transmute into a blue or white one. Consider this a good thing, as blue and white LEDs are more expensive than red ones. P.S. Most white LEDs are blue LEDs with some yellow phosphor.
Ahhh welll... even though it seems it's impossible for a led to change colour.... I still wouldn't be surprised if it happenen to me... . Weird things happen when I start to mod. Garbach
ive been thinking about buyinng 500 bright blue leds and wireing them up in my room as apose to a reg light bulb maby have them spread out it would be really cool
I have about 20 white leds and when i was changing one of my power led's to white, i accidentily ran 5v across it and it changed to blue... only for a second though, as i quickly realized what i was doing.
