Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
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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.
You can actually buy tinted tape to dim them without completely blacking them out. So you can take your clock from “bright enough to keep your entire bedroom lit” to “just bright enough to read in the dark.”
Found out while watching Technology Connections. Bright blue monochromatic LEDs are one of his biggest pet peeves, and he mentioned the tinted tape off-hand in one of his videos.
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.
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.
precision flathead screwdriver
Ah yes. Just like my precision printer adjustment mallet.
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 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.
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.
Or how every appliance needs to have an alarming beeeeeeep to alert you its done. Like its cool that you finished sterilizing our babies bottles but it wasn't really urgent...
Y'all need some Light Dims (yes, that website didn't enter the 21st century, but their product is luckily solid).
I bought an LG TV for my bedroom. Its WHITE LED is FUCKING BLINKING WHEN OFF. I taped it with black tape, but then it's so bright that's leaking from the button spacing. I had to buy a smart relay like a shelly pm and write a simple program like "after 11pm if power usage is under 2W, cut the power to the appliance"
I know your rage.
I ended up buying LED dimming stickers off Amazon and went hog wild on all the devices in the house.
There's specialty stickers? What do they do that tape can't?
I also bought dimming stickers. I can't tell you why everyone uses them, of course, but I bought stickers rather than using tape for a couple of reasons. The main one is that there are some lights that indicate information I still want to get. Our fan has LEDs to indicate current speed, my wireless phone charger has a light to indicate that it detects the phone. That information is good, and I want it! Just not as brightly as the manufacturer wants to give it to me, so I put stickers that dim about 75% and they're perfect. The other big reason, for me, is that I simply find the stickers more aesthetically pleasing. Even if I want to block the light fully, rather than just dim it, a little circular sticker looks nicer to me than a piece of tape.
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.
Thought this was going to be a more specific complaint about computer hardware/accessories. So much of the high end stuff is just littered with bullshit RGB lighting. Coolers, GPUs, keyboards, mice, monitors, case fans, even fucking RAM sticks! It's insane.
For general appliances my complaint wouldn't be the single LED on it but the brightness. Like you I cover up the bright ones with electrical tape. It wouldn't even cost them any extra money to make it lighter. Just requires a different resistor value.
The team that invented blue LEDs won a nobel prize.
Now every fucking item in my room has a beacon that would put the eye of fucking Sauron to shame.
100% agree with you, and have started destroying LEDs where possible.
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.
What drives me nuts is all of the light fixtures that have Integrated LED bulbs in them.
They make regular LED bulbs to put into fixtures, there's no reason for the stupid integrated LEDs. LED bulbs give you the option of choosing brightness and tone.
And sure, integrated bulbs may be rated to last 20 years, but the circuitry and drivers controlling those bulbs are not. You'll be lucky to get 5 years out of it, and then you have to toss the whole thing away and buy a new one and install it again.
You’ve reminded to tape off the blinking blue LED on my monitor, it’s been driving me nuts when I’m trying to sleep!
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.
From an electronic tech perspective... I've been replacing the LEDs in anything that annoys me with a dull red and a resistor valued to keep it barely visible. It's a tad more eloquent than tape. Most things don't need a led at all. I'd love to see manufacturers switch to an e paper solution with a simple "on" or "off" displayed. And I hate standby led's.
I've been covering LEDs with tape the last 20 years, televisions and media players in particular. Who in their right mind decides to build a DVD player with a damn blue laser led in the front panel to blind your movie experience?
Smoke detectors that blink once every ten minutes to let you know that there is nothing going on, with a light that could be mistaken for an electrical fire. Open up, cover LED hole with tape, careful not to disrupt smoke sensing capabilities, close up. Now the LED is visible when looking for it.
Get yourself a cheap pack of various coloured electrical tapes. Tin foil when it's not enough.
I just sleep with a mask, but I hear you man, that trend is super-irritating. I think it comes from people who cant tell that something is powered on without seeing an led indicator
Thought I read somewhere it’s cheaper to get these super bright LEDs, so they use those rather than something easier on the eye.