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?
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.
Did testers like blue LEDs more than red? Everything seems to be blue now but red are better for your eyes at night. Idgi.