36 ms·

Oh right, about those LEDs

407 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

k__ 10y ago
LEDs are an adventure. 5 Years ago I replaced all my light bulbs with LEDs, but it was not easy. First I had to find a brand that didn't sell this clinically white light emitting crap and then I had to buy 3 times as much as I needed and send 2/3 back because not all emitted the same color.
- dboreham 10y ago
  I tried various different LED bulbs many of which did not pass the wife's standards for color temperature. Eventually settled on the products Costco sells which are coincidentally also quite inexpensive.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  I've had Ikea LED light bulbs for just over a year now. They're cheap enough, and labelled with useful units, for example 400 lumen, 6.3 Watts, 2700 Kelvin, 25000 hours. The dimmer ones were made in China, but the brightest ones were made in Germany.
- strictnein 10y ago
  It's a lot easier these days. Still takes buying a couple different options so you can get the color right, but they're consistent.
- phil21 10y ago
  It's trivial these days - just go to Home Depot and pick up a few models and see what you like. They generally are pretty consistent now. That said, some people are absolutely insane when it comes to color temps. I learned this the hard way helping friends covert to LED - the pickiness is something I never knew existed and gave me a new appreciation for how much people care about "their" version of light.
sdfjkl 10y ago
Those daylight backlight upgrade kits are nice. We boat nerds always lust after stuff like that, because we like to take computers out in the sun (and rain and airborne saltwater) and this is one of the key parts for doing that.
sliken 10y ago
Have to say the evolution in LEDs has been pretty amazing. First we had terrible yellow fragile maglites that requires several large C or D cells for anything approaching reasonable brightness and battery life. I had my small maglite die at the bottom of the grand canyon, and the top of MT shasta. After trying to replace a tiny incandescent bulb in the dark in challenging conditions I decided I was switching to LEDs, no matter what the compromise was. Similar monitors had broad spectrum CFLs that generated UV, converted it to white light with a phosphor then threw away most of the light and filtered it down to approximately R, G, and B. The resulting color accuracy was terrible. LEDs started out expensive, not very bright, and mostly red. Migrated to different colors, I think blue was the most expensive. Finally white LEDs started showing up in tiny AA or AAA flashlights with 50-75 lumens. About as bright as the 2xAA maglite that were huge in comparison. Color coverage got better, life got better, efficiency started ramping up. 100-200 lumen flashlights started to become more common. 18650s that have substantially more power and a more LED friendly 3.7V started to appear. Year or two later 400-500 lumens were common, efficiency kept increasing. Started to appear as backlights, car dash boards, brake lights, etc. CFLs switched from wasting 95% of the light to ditching the white phosphors for a mix of RGB phosphors. The savings were twofold and multiplicative. The first was generating UV -> RGB directly with mix of RGB phosphors in the CFL. Then additionally instead of narrow notch filters that didn't pass much light they switched to very wide spectrum filters that passed most of the light. So a red pixel didn't need to be within 1% of red, but instead just block 99% of G and B. Since the RGB phosphors emitted very close to the ideal frequencies the color accuracy increased. Monitor power requirements dropped significantly.... only to be killed off by more efficient LEDs. Things doubled again, small ish flashlights much like the 2xAA maglites except fatter. 1000 lumens hitting $50-$100 points points. Now throwing a usable light 300 Meters isn't unusual from a small hand held light. Depending on your use recharging once a month isn't unusual. 4-or 5 light levels are common, and runtimes of 1.5 hours (max light) to 100 or more hours (on low) aren't uncommon. So now macbook pros that are extremely thin (greatly helped by very tiny LEDs for backlights) get 10 hours of battery light with 500 nit screens with wonderful color accuracy. Similarly even 55" LED screens are crazy high resolution and crazy cheap. The cost per pixel doesn't seem on that crazy different than the cost per transistor. Sadly like Moore's law, LEDs aren't getting much better anymore. For the first time I purchased a new flashlight after 2-3 years... and the best I could find was zero % brighter 8-(. It's not just computers that have been improving like crazy.
kosma 10y ago
This is exactly my experience. Cheap Chinese LEDs seem like a bargain until you discover they are not spec'd beyond "they emit light". The steep price you pay for CREE and other brand-name LEDs is for a product that actually lives up to its datasheet.
- ryao 10y ago
  I have gotten some good Chinese filament LED bulbs from eBay, but it is very hit or miss. I did not analyze them for the quality of the output beyond "it looks good to me". The total cost is lower than CREE and other brands even if I consider that I had to throw away half of them due to a poorly manufactured batch that had an audible electric whine and failures of the higher output models after a month or two. If you are willing to buy multiple times what you need to make up for the quality issues, you can get a decent deal with the cheap Chinese ones. The ones that whined and the ones that did not whine had a fabric covering the wires at the base of the bulbs. If I had some way of knowing which eBay merchants were selling those, I would get a much better deal. By the way, Nichia is a Japanese company.
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    Buy cheap, buy twice. Even if you get a good one, no-brand Chinese bulbs just don't last. They're badly engineered and use cast-off LED chips that nobody else wants. I made the mistake of buying some Chinese LED lamps for my utility rooms and outbuildings; they all died within 18 months. Philips and Osram LED lamps just aren't that expensive. Cheaping out just isn't worth the hassle.
    - foofoo55 10y ago
      "Buy-twice" methods like this further convince me that a stronger incentive is needed to ensure such junk is not manufactured but is integrated into what many are calling a "circular economy". I wish it was the responsibility of the manufacturers to take back all failed and end-of-life products and recycle the materials such that their waste output was minimal. Likewise, the I wish the wholesaler and retailers were responsible to take back the product from the purchaser or consumer and send it back upstream (and not drop it in the dumpster like Costco does).
agumonkey 10y ago
For the padders interested in modding CCFL to LEDs, he wrote https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-backlight.shtml https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-backlight.sht...
nickhalfasleep 10y ago
The growth in efficiency has been spectacular. Every other source will be retired in the face of LED greater efficiency, solid state design, and lower cost. The only light more efficient than an LED is an LED that is turned off. Demand-based lighting, network controlled is the next step. Cree already sells Power-over-Ethernet powered and controlled light fixtures to do this: http://www2.cree.com/smartcast-landing-page http://www2.cree.com/smartcast-landing-page
- coldpie 10y ago
  > Demand-based lighting, network controlled is the next step. Oh good, Auernheimer can wake me up in the middle of the night.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, weev has already shown a propensity for using badly secured connected devices to troll people. And you know that someone will have the creds to their system be admin:admin... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-weev-made-thousands-of-internet-connected-printers-spit-out-racist-flyers http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-weev-made-thousands-...
    - coldpie 10y ago
      Lots of <s>botnet</s>internet-of-things fans on here, I guess ;)
- ryao 10y ago
  Incandescent lighting is more energy efficient when the filament is placed inside the right "photonics crystal": http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bulbs-0111 http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bul...
  - bdamm 10y ago
    It's a really cool idea, although their statements about efficiency seem rather questionable to me. LEDs are only twice as efficient as traditional bulbs? A laughable statement, since I get the same light with 1/5th to 1/8th the energy using off the shelf bulbs.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
I put his conversion kit in my X61t and it is whoa-Nelly bright and the colors are spectacular. I recall that it also costs a fifth what a genuine ThinkPad CCFL backlight module costs.
samstave 10y ago
How much was a strip 5000 LEDs?
- xiphmont 10y ago
  $1720 delivered, and that's been fully recouped.
yuubi 10y ago
> "What do you mean? You can have any bin mentioned on the spec sheet." Reminds me of the ancient story of the electronics manufacturer that sourced some resistors or whatever from Japan for the first time. The spec called for max 1% bad parts or whatever. When the parts arrived, the box contained a packet with a note that said something like "Thanks for your order. We are unsure why you want 1% defective parts, but for your convenience, we have packaged them separately."
- jkbyc 10y ago
  "An IBM plant in Windsor, Ontario, is said to have ordered a shipment of components from a Japanese firm, specifying an acceptable quality level(AQL) of three defective components per 10,000 shipped. In a covering letter accompanying the shipment, the Japanese company apologized and said it had met with great difficulty producing these defective parts, and had been unable to understand why they were required. They wrote: “We Japanese have hard time understanding North American business practices, but the three defective parts per 10,000 have been included and are wrapped separately. Hope this pleases.” This seems to be the oldest reference: Chris Taylor, (1995) "The case for customer satisfaction", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 5 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 14 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081767?src=recsys&journalCode=msq http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081... but behind a paywall ...it is referred to for example by http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_37 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_3... "The Effectiveness of Service Quality by Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI) Towards Customer Satisfaction"
  - sp332 10y ago
    Funny, I heard it as AOL buying modems. Instead of a complaint, they got a shipment in two parts with a note: "We don't know why you wanted defective parts, but for your convenience, we packaged them separately."
vxNsr 10y ago
Can someone explain what it is he was trying to do, as in, why did he want such a small batch of LEDs for?
- tempestn 10y ago
  It sounds like he's replacing the old LCD back-lights in Thinkpads with LEDs.
GregBuchholz 10y ago
Speaking of LEDs, I've been on and off looking for 0402 or 0603 pink LEDs. There seem to have been multiple manufacturers building them years ago, but it seems like they've been discontinued/obsolete. Now I can't seem to find them at the larger distributors (Digikey/Mouser/ etc.). And I'm leery of buying them off of Ali-express/ebay, because I wouldn't want to have to test them each before using them, and for this particular project it wouldn't be worth it to rework if we had to replace non-functioning LEDs. Anyone know more about the trials and tribulations of pink LED manufacture?
- kosma 10y ago
  I don't know the reasons behind the shortage, but if this is a one-off thing, TME still carries some: http://www.tme.eu/gb/details/osk40603c1e/smd-colour-leds/optosupply/ http://www.tme.eu/gb/details/osk40603c1e/smd-colour-leds/opt... By the way, wouldn't it be feasible to just mix red and blue, either discrete or in RGB packages?
  - GregBuchholz 10y ago
    Thanks for the find. I want to cramp about 100 of these as close together as possible.
    - kosma 10y ago
      Go for it before they sell out! :) TME is our primary supplier and from my experience they are not exactly stellar in restocking components when they run out.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
Speaking of LED lighting, I've been meaning to upgrade my living space lighting. The one killer feature I'm looking for is color temperature control: I want to be able to adjust between "soft white" (2700K whitepoint) and "daylight" (5000K) whitepoint. Basically, what Philips Hue "White Ambiance" [1] bulbs offer. Are there any alternatives? [1] http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-white-ambiance-extension-bulbs http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-whit...
- andrewmunsell 10y ago
  I am currently using Osram Lightify bulbs with my SmartThings hub (no separate Osram hub required unless you want to update the firmware), and I have both tunable white and tunable white+rgb bulbs that work great.
  - cgvgffyv 10y ago
    Santa can I please have a separate HN for those who buy lightbulbs with firmware to post to? Jesus.
- lbotos 10y ago
  Any reason you don't want hue? I use LiFX Color bulbs (more pricey but I got a great price) and they have been one of those "I don't NEED this but really fun and wonderful" additions to my life.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  LIFX makes white-only bulbs with color temp control for reasonable prices: http://www.lifx.com/products/white-800?variant=933783339 http://www.lifx.com/products/white-800?variant=933783339 You just missed their Black Friday sale too :( I have a few and they work well with my other home automation stuff (broadlink IR+RF remote + Aukey RF outlets + Moteino system).
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    How are you managing the Broadlink kit? They're one of the only things that can control my aircon, but the Android app is pretty bad.

407 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

k__ 10y ago

LEDs are an adventure. 5 Years ago I replaced all my light bulbs with LEDs, but it was not easy. First I had to find a brand that didn't sell this clinically white light emitting crap and then I had to buy 3 times as much as I needed and send 2/3 back because not all emitted the same color.

dboreham 10y ago
I tried various different LED bulbs many of which did not pass the wife's standards for color temperature. Eventually settled on the products Costco sells which are coincidentally also quite inexpensive.
Symbiote 10y ago
I've had Ikea LED light bulbs for just over a year now. They're cheap enough, and labelled with useful units, for example 400 lumen, 6.3 Watts, 2700 Kelvin, 25000 hours. The dimmer ones were made in China, but the brightest ones were made in Germany.
strictnein 10y ago
It's a lot easier these days. Still takes buying a couple different options so you can get the color right, but they're consistent.
phil21 10y ago
It's trivial these days - just go to Home Depot and pick up a few models and see what you like. They generally are pretty consistent now. That said, some people are absolutely insane when it comes to color temps. I learned this the hard way helping friends covert to LED - the pickiness is something I never knew existed and gave me a new appreciation for how much people care about "their" version of light.

sdfjkl 10y ago

Those daylight backlight upgrade kits are nice. We boat nerds always lust after stuff like that, because we like to take computers out in the sun (and rain and airborne saltwater) and this is one of the key parts for doing that.

sliken 10y ago

Have to say the evolution in LEDs has been pretty amazing. First we had terrible yellow fragile maglites that requires several large C or D cells for anything approaching reasonable brightness and battery life. I had my small maglite die at the bottom of the grand canyon, and the top of MT shasta. After trying to replace a tiny incandescent bulb in the dark in challenging conditions I decided I was switching to LEDs, no matter what the compromise was. Similar monitors had broad spectrum CFLs that generated UV, converted it to white light with a phosphor then threw away most of the light and filtered it down to approximately R, G, and B. The resulting color accuracy was terrible. LEDs started out expensive, not very bright, and mostly red. Migrated to different colors, I think blue was the most expensive. Finally white LEDs started showing up in tiny AA or AAA flashlights with 50-75 lumens. About as bright as the 2xAA maglite that were huge in comparison. Color coverage got better, life got better, efficiency started ramping up. 100-200 lumen flashlights started to become more common. 18650s that have substantially more power and a more LED friendly 3.7V started to appear. Year or two later 400-500 lumens were common, efficiency kept increasing. Started to appear as backlights, car dash boards, brake lights, etc. CFLs switched from wasting 95% of the light to ditching the white phosphors for a mix of RGB phosphors. The savings were twofold and multiplicative. The first was generating UV -> RGB directly with mix of RGB phosphors in the CFL. Then additionally instead of narrow notch filters that didn't pass much light they switched to very wide spectrum filters that passed most of the light. So a red pixel didn't need to be within 1% of red, but instead just block 99% of G and B. Since the RGB phosphors emitted very close to the ideal frequencies the color accuracy increased. Monitor power requirements dropped significantly.... only to be killed off by more efficient LEDs. Things doubled again, small ish flashlights much like the 2xAA maglites except fatter. 1000 lumens hitting $50-$100 points points. Now throwing a usable light 300 Meters isn't unusual from a small hand held light. Depending on your use recharging once a month isn't unusual. 4-or 5 light levels are common, and runtimes of 1.5 hours (max light) to 100 or more hours (on low) aren't uncommon. So now macbook pros that are extremely thin (greatly helped by very tiny LEDs for backlights) get 10 hours of battery light with 500 nit screens with wonderful color accuracy. Similarly even 55" LED screens are crazy high resolution and crazy cheap. The cost per pixel doesn't seem on that crazy different than the cost per transistor. Sadly like Moore's law, LEDs aren't getting much better anymore. For the first time I purchased a new flashlight after 2-3 years... and the best I could find was zero % brighter 8-(. It's not just computers that have been improving like crazy.

kosma 10y ago

This is exactly my experience. Cheap Chinese LEDs seem like a bargain until you discover they are not spec'd beyond "they emit light". The steep price you pay for CREE and other brand-name LEDs is for a product that actually lives up to its datasheet.

ryao 10y ago
I have gotten some good Chinese filament LED bulbs from eBay, but it is very hit or miss. I did not analyze them for the quality of the output beyond "it looks good to me". The total cost is lower than CREE and other brands even if I consider that I had to throw away half of them due to a poorly manufactured batch that had an audible electric whine and failures of the higher output models after a month or two. If you are willing to buy multiple times what you need to make up for the quality issues, you can get a decent deal with the cheap Chinese ones. The ones that whined and the ones that did not whine had a fabric covering the wires at the base of the bulbs. If I had some way of knowing which eBay merchants were selling those, I would get a much better deal. By the way, Nichia is a Japanese company.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  Buy cheap, buy twice. Even if you get a good one, no-brand Chinese bulbs just don't last. They're badly engineered and use cast-off LED chips that nobody else wants. I made the mistake of buying some Chinese LED lamps for my utility rooms and outbuildings; they all died within 18 months. Philips and Osram LED lamps just aren't that expensive. Cheaping out just isn't worth the hassle.
  - foofoo55 10y ago
    "Buy-twice" methods like this further convince me that a stronger incentive is needed to ensure such junk is not manufactured but is integrated into what many are calling a "circular economy". I wish it was the responsibility of the manufacturers to take back all failed and end-of-life products and recycle the materials such that their waste output was minimal. Likewise, the I wish the wholesaler and retailers were responsible to take back the product from the purchaser or consumer and send it back upstream (and not drop it in the dumpster like Costco does).

agumonkey 10y ago

For the padders interested in modding CCFL to LEDs, he wrote https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-backlight.shtml https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-backlight.sht...

nickhalfasleep 10y ago

The growth in efficiency has been spectacular. Every other source will be retired in the face of LED greater efficiency, solid state design, and lower cost. The only light more efficient than an LED is an LED that is turned off. Demand-based lighting, network controlled is the next step. Cree already sells Power-over-Ethernet powered and controlled light fixtures to do this: http://www2.cree.com/smartcast-landing-page http://www2.cree.com/smartcast-landing-page

coldpie 10y ago
> Demand-based lighting, network controlled is the next step. Oh good, Auernheimer can wake me up in the middle of the night.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, weev has already shown a propensity for using badly secured connected devices to troll people. And you know that someone will have the creds to their system be admin:admin... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-weev-made-thousands-of-internet-connected-printers-spit-out-racist-flyers http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-weev-made-thousands-...
  - coldpie 10y ago
    Lots of <s>botnet</s>internet-of-things fans on here, I guess ;)
ryao 10y ago
Incandescent lighting is more energy efficient when the filament is placed inside the right "photonics crystal": http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bulbs-0111 http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bul...
- bdamm 10y ago
  It's a really cool idea, although their statements about efficiency seem rather questionable to me. LEDs are only twice as efficient as traditional bulbs? A laughable statement, since I get the same light with 1/5th to 1/8th the energy using off the shelf bulbs.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

I put his conversion kit in my X61t and it is whoa-Nelly bright and the colors are spectacular. I recall that it also costs a fifth what a genuine ThinkPad CCFL backlight module costs.

samstave 10y ago

How much was a strip 5000 LEDs?

xiphmont 10y ago
$1720 delivered, and that's been fully recouped.

yuubi 10y ago

> "What do you mean? You can have any bin mentioned on the spec sheet." Reminds me of the ancient story of the electronics manufacturer that sourced some resistors or whatever from Japan for the first time. The spec called for max 1% bad parts or whatever. When the parts arrived, the box contained a packet with a note that said something like "Thanks for your order. We are unsure why you want 1% defective parts, but for your convenience, we have packaged them separately."

jkbyc 10y ago
"An IBM plant in Windsor, Ontario, is said to have ordered a shipment of components from a Japanese firm, specifying an acceptable quality level(AQL) of three defective components per 10,000 shipped. In a covering letter accompanying the shipment, the Japanese company apologized and said it had met with great difficulty producing these defective parts, and had been unable to understand why they were required. They wrote: “We Japanese have hard time understanding North American business practices, but the three defective parts per 10,000 have been included and are wrapped separately. Hope this pleases.” This seems to be the oldest reference: Chris Taylor, (1995) "The case for customer satisfaction", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 5 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 14 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081767?src=recsys&journalCode=msq http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081... but behind a paywall ...it is referred to for example by http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_37 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_3... "The Effectiveness of Service Quality by Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI) Towards Customer Satisfaction"
- sp332 10y ago
  Funny, I heard it as AOL buying modems. Instead of a complaint, they got a shipment in two parts with a note: "We don't know why you wanted defective parts, but for your convenience, we packaged them separately."

vxNsr 10y ago

Can someone explain what it is he was trying to do, as in, why did he want such a small batch of LEDs for?

tempestn 10y ago
It sounds like he's replacing the old LCD back-lights in Thinkpads with LEDs.

GregBuchholz 10y ago

Speaking of LEDs, I've been on and off looking for 0402 or 0603 pink LEDs. There seem to have been multiple manufacturers building them years ago, but it seems like they've been discontinued/obsolete. Now I can't seem to find them at the larger distributors (Digikey/Mouser/ etc.). And I'm leery of buying them off of Ali-express/ebay, because I wouldn't want to have to test them each before using them, and for this particular project it wouldn't be worth it to rework if we had to replace non-functioning LEDs. Anyone know more about the trials and tribulations of pink LED manufacture?

kosma 10y ago
I don't know the reasons behind the shortage, but if this is a one-off thing, TME still carries some: http://www.tme.eu/gb/details/osk40603c1e/smd-colour-leds/optosupply/ http://www.tme.eu/gb/details/osk40603c1e/smd-colour-leds/opt... By the way, wouldn't it be feasible to just mix red and blue, either discrete or in RGB packages?
- GregBuchholz 10y ago
  Thanks for the find. I want to cramp about 100 of these as close together as possible.
  - kosma 10y ago
    Go for it before they sell out! :) TME is our primary supplier and from my experience they are not exactly stellar in restocking components when they run out.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

Speaking of LED lighting, I've been meaning to upgrade my living space lighting. The one killer feature I'm looking for is color temperature control: I want to be able to adjust between "soft white" (2700K whitepoint) and "daylight" (5000K) whitepoint. Basically, what Philips Hue "White Ambiance" [1] bulbs offer. Are there any alternatives? [1] http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-white-ambiance-extension-bulbs http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-whit...

andrewmunsell 10y ago
I am currently using Osram Lightify bulbs with my SmartThings hub (no separate Osram hub required unless you want to update the firmware), and I have both tunable white and tunable white+rgb bulbs that work great.
- cgvgffyv 10y ago
  Santa can I please have a separate HN for those who buy lightbulbs with firmware to post to? Jesus.
lbotos 10y ago
Any reason you don't want hue? I use LiFX Color bulbs (more pricey but I got a great price) and they have been one of those "I don't NEED this but really fun and wonderful" additions to my life.
seanp2k2 10y ago
LIFX makes white-only bulbs with color temp control for reasonable prices: http://www.lifx.com/products/white-800?variant=933783339 http://www.lifx.com/products/white-800?variant=933783339 You just missed their Black Friday sale too :( I have a few and they work well with my other home automation stuff (broadlink IR+RF remote + Aukey RF outlets + Moteino system).
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  How are you managing the Broadlink kit? They're one of the only things that can control my aircon, but the Android app is pretty bad.