LED brightness Dilemma?

[formerMember1]

hi,
I am using super bright Red 5mm water clear LEDs. I sanded the LED for better viewing angle.  It has from 7000 to 10000 milicandela. and 2.4forward voltage.  

Anyway, my dilemma is this:

Inside i could easily get by with a 100k series resistor, actually up to around 150k.   At around 43k it is still to bright for your eyes indoors. BUT, when i go outside the LED "disappears." (and i mean in the shade not even in direct sunlight) If i use a 33k you could see the LED pretty good outside, but not great, then when i come inside it is way  too bright. Really aggervating bright. :wink:  

Anybody run into this problem before?

Do LEDs just not perform good on outdoors?

Any solution?  

IF i hold the pedal in the direct sunlight, not matter what series resistor i use it is not visible.  (only a little if you put your finger over it to cast a shadow)

[formerMember1]

i was thinking about just forgetting the LED being visible in the outdoors.  And just using a high series resistor to use the LED comfortably indoors and save battery.

I figured my battery will last over 3000 hours if i use a resistor over a 100K.  that is when the pedal is ON too.  When off the voltage drops to almost nothing.(16.7uA)  If i use a 43k resistor for the LED my pedal will last around 1000 hours.

[Seljer]

Heh, I've been using 4k7 ohm resistors with my ultrabright blue LEDs (the ones from Banzai)  :?  

When I actually get around to having a real pedalboard I fear I'm going to go blind whenever I look at it

[formerMember1]

man those blue LED could be really bad on your eyes.  I hooked one up with a 10k resistor and looked into it, i got a headache and my eyeballs hurt for a while.

For some reason i don't like blue LEDs or white ones.  They take too much battery and i just would rather RED. The blue ones are nice looking though. :wink:

[Seljer]

I'm kind of aiming for a full rainbow coloured pedalboard, I think, I just need green and yellow and violet and I've got most of the visible spectrum

hmm....maybe you could do something like that regarding effect order too.

[Mike Burgundy]

Mind your eyes guys (and ears, come to think of it)
Getting lights or LEDs to be visible in direct sunlight is practically impossible, and not wise if you want to look directly at them under lower light conditions.
Remember that the difference in light intensity can be a factor of one to several million (from say, night with moonlight to bright sunny day at noon)
In order to get good comfortable visibility the lightsource needs to be brighter than the ambient light, but not too much brighter. I dunno, say 1:2 (I just picked that, not based on anything)
I don't see any way to get LEDs to do all of that huge range acceptably, so if you really want to get around this, you might want to install some kind of LDR, and have it adjst the LED. Cool.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Saying it one more time can't hurt..... try a led that BlInKs, because it is very much easier to see that  a led is blinking, compared to just telling whether it is on or off all the time.
If this was a life-threating problem (??thermonuclear device armed or not??) I'd use an indicator relay, these latch & have a display tag thing that clicks over to show the state (like those electromagnetic matrix displays on buses).

[Mike Burgundy]

Hey that's an idea-clicks!
Why not make something that makes sound, to indicate....(wanders off babbling and foaming at the mouth)


Good idea, blinking.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

I think I was taking it too seriously.. now that I think about it, the obvious thing is one of those flags, like on the side of rural letterboxes. A little solenoid could flip one up easy!
..and  then there was the fx box I had that sent smoke signals... :oops:

[Mark Hammer]

LED visibility is partly dependent on brightness, but also on what the LED is in contrast to.  In that regard, it is no different than any other aspect of your visual field.  Finding your car in a parking lot these days is particularly difficult if it is silver/grey, because your car won't contrast with anything around it.

So, if you are trying to make your LED state more easily spotted, try surrounding it with black, somehow.  That could be a black plastic bezel, or even just a painted black bull's eye around it.  If you NEED to be able to see it when playing outdoors daylight gigs, then a little sloped "hood" might be useful.  The key thing is that the LED needs to be situated in the midst of darkness in some manner so that illumination is not the only thing that helps you to see it.

Incidentally, ever considered a little toggle, slide, or dipswitch with an inddor/outdoor illumination setting?  E.g., 120k for indoor dark stages, and a SPST shunt with a parallel 68k resistor (gives 43k with 120k in parallel) for outdoors.

[formerMember1]

Incidentally, ever considered a little toggle, slide, or dipswitch with an inddor/outdoor illumination setting? E.g., 120k for indoor dark stages, and a SPST shunt with a parallel 68k resistor (gives 43k with 120k in parallel) for outdoors.

Great idea, now why didn't i think of that. :wink:

I am gonna try that on my next pedal,

I already put one of those ugly chrome bezels in her. :evil:

And i don't have room in my 1590B box, but i will next time. :wink:

thanks

[Mark Hammer]

I honestly don't know what the big thing is about chrome bezels.  You see them popping up everywhere, but in terms of aiding LED visibility they are more useless than tits on a bull.  Even gigging in a darkened club, how does one distinguish between glare of spotlights bouncing off the chrome, and the LED it encases?

Nothing against bezels in general.  However, I should think that a black anodized one would go a long way towards maximizing visibility, relative to a shiny one, and being able to reduce the current consumption of a high-brightness element down to something pretty negligible - a feature in anyone's design, if you ask me.  Another way of doing it would be a black plastic bezel with a translucent end piece to diffuse the light, so that you could shove just about any LED in there and have a nice visible round dot.  I won't profess to being an expert on LED diffusion, but it wouldn't surprise me if one could "spread" the light a bit to make the radius of the illuminated area bigger than the actual LED.  It would look sort of like a slice off a jelly-filled tube/cylinder.  

It seems to me that the LED bezels we have available to us as builders are not necessarily made with our needs in mind.  Steve, if you are reading this, there is a product absolutely ideal for builders, and something you could sell to commercial clients as well.

[vanhansen]

I've used both the fancy chrome and the simple punch-in plastic black bezels.  I prefer the plastic black ones for several reasons.  One, the price, they are much cheaper.  And two, it's a lot easier to change out the LED with them over the chrome bezels that need the nut untightend and the rubber gromet removed just to get the LED out.  After using the chrome ones on two projects, I get fed up with them and will use the plastic exclusively now.

The 2.4v forward voltage LED has to be brighter than all get-out in the dark.  :shock:  I like to stay in the 1.7v forward voltage and use a 10k limiting resistor, even with ultra-brights it's just right.  A 1.7v forward ultra-bright blue or red is plenty bright with a 10k resistor.  I don't need to see it from 100 yards away, I just need to see that it's on when at the pedalboard and I still get plenty of battery life.

[formerMember1]

yeah i agree i do not like the LED bezels, but for this pedal it looks better.  Becuase the pedal is silver and the jacks are silver, and i have a white knob, and a white washer for 3pdt.  
yeah i know white washers suck too. :wink:

it is my first pedal, so not a big loss.  And i already had my LED glue into the bezel,and the hole drilled for a bezel.  I tried to switch to the black plastics, but the hole was already too big, and the LED was super glued.
But even for this pedal, i like the chrome, but not others in the future :wink:

I ended up using a 33k resistor, it is really bright at night, but just on the border line of too bright, and you could see it outside really good, just not in sunlight obviously. :wink:

I also sanded it to increase viewing angle. as suggested per (hammer time) :wink:

[Mark Hammer]

Cosmetically, I think the chrome bezel looks great.  It complements the chrome of the jacks and switch nicely.  The sticking point is that it just isn't as functional in that application as another type of bezel might be.