Are LED Christmas lights really lasting as long as they claim? Anybody witness some failures?
I was just on
D from BC British Columbia Canada
Merely not offered by the holiday light string manufacturer. Not necessary if the LEDs do not fail. Merely get an LED of the same shape, size, general brightness class (normally OK to use any of high efficiency/superbright/ultrabright/InGaN/GaAlAsP/InGaAsP), and same color. (Keep in mind that brilliant non-yellowish green and dimmer chartreuse green are not the same thing.) For that matter, replacing the failed LED with any singtle-chip LED that is mechanically compatible normally works. Even if the voltage drop is off by a volt or two, everything will normally work.
Not a problem if the LEDs do not fail. Also, I suspect plenty of people reading this newsgroup can replace an LED in a "sealed product" via suitable "surgery".
Should not be a problem if the product actually is sealed.
If the product spends a lot of time outdoors, it should be rated for such use. Keep in mind that many outdoor-rated holiday light strings come with instructions to deploy them no more than 90 days a year.
That requires a lot of daylight exposure, if it happens at all. Since the LEDs are usually colored ones with somewhat narrow spectral bandwidth, fading of the lenses will not do much to the color of the light.
That normally requires a lot of exposure to bright daylight, typically direct sunlight. The damage comes from UV and shorter visible violet wavelengths close to UV. The plastic lenses usually block most of that, especially if they are red, orange, yellow, or green.
Yellowing also has little impact on red, orange, yellow, and yellow-green LEDs. The impact on non-yellowish-green is minor, white LEDs affected thus get a little dimmer and a warmer shade of white, and blue LEDs are dimmed somewhat and made slightly more greenish (color of blue LEDs is hard to change much without a major loss of light since most of their output is usaully in a fairly narrow spectral band).
I think it would have been better to make (and support) claims of actual failures, rather than replacement difficulty, minor degradations and corrosion.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Sounds like they were on the boat to long.
Bob
I rent my Xmas lighting, from a company that installs and removes them every Xmas season. I find the new LED stuff a bit disconcerting... the white is _really_ white ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Sure, I can fix my own LED Christmas lights if they fail. But I think most people are only able to 'pop' in a new light.
I didn't know about the 'no more than 90 day outdoor' restriction.
I have to wonder about how many designers raced to get LED christmas lights to market. How many lost. And how many made millions from it.
I had the idea many years before LED Christmas lights came out. But, like many...didn't do anything.. :(
D from BC British Columbia Canada
We got "warm white" LED lights last christmas (they were not available the previous year). They're not as huge as the ones that try to look like bulbs- sort of a stubby cylinder with a dimple on the end, and they don't have that blue-white harsh glare. I've got a string of similar pure blue ones in my office running 24/7
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it\'s the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
I saw a retail-marketed LED Christmas light string around 1986! Of course, the LEDs were not that bright back then!
The "initial brand" that I saw only a few to several years ago was "Forever Bright". When that brand appeared to me to disappear, I saw what appeared to me to be most-similar products immediately afterwards to be of the Philips brand. And it does appear to me that Philips is aggressively buying LED light fixture technology companies.
Philips is one of the "Big 3" "lightbulb manufacturers" (electric lamp manufacturers). (The other 2 for North America are GE and Sylvania.) I expect Philips to have the quality of products with their name on them being "at least adequate". My experience so far is that "Big 3" has generally better quality than "non-Big-3" for lightbulbs ("electric lamps").
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Yes. I've come across the same. Here in BC, I recently learned that a company called TIR
D from BC British Columbia Canada
I already have problems with a set I left outside. The low current draw is a bad match for crimped connections.
greg
I noticed the icicles really are outstanding with the LED lights. It really makes them look cold.
greg
I want LED multicolor rope lights. Have not seen them yet.
This has been coming for years. Field trials of LED street lighting are already underway.
From a one time registered expert in crimp technology, you must have done something wrong. The documentation is so poor for thirty years or more that it is real easy to do it very wrong.
Neato... Let's see... How about a microcontroller per 3 leds in the light rope.. Have all the microcontrollers listening to a serial data line (the slaves). And then control all the microcontrollers with a master controller.
D from BC British Columbia Canada
IIRC some of TIR's exterior building lighting is LED. (On their website I believe.) I should pop by and check it out some night.. Hee hee..I'll bring my cordless sawzall and a cordless screwdriver.. Just kidding.. :)
D from BC British Columbia Canada
You mean something like one string of the Cubatron:
It uses the PIC12F629, which is a bit expensive. Some parts of the new RS08 series from Freescale are sold for as low as $0.45 for 500 units:
which is half the price of the PIC18F452. It has 2k flash and an internal clock. Another nice feature and no wonder for Motorola: The instruction set looks very similar to the good old 6502, which I've used long time ago on C64.
Now you have to think, if you use standard logic like the 7400 any more, if you can get a full microcontroller for nearly the same price.
-- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Yup...that looks like what I expected.. And also expected that someone has done this before. Usually anything I can imagine, it's been done before. I just have to figure out how to make my imagination to go beyond others imagination. :)
D from BC British Columbia Canada
Motorola did the 6802, not the 6502.
Actually sometimes what i need for a project is a handful of 22v10s. Big speed advantage. Device and programming costs limit most uses to hobby for me.
I don't know the 6802, but you are right, MOS designed the 6502, but it was the same team which designed the 6800 at Motorola.
Device cost can be as low as $1.20 for the single unit price for more modern CPLDs with 3.3V power supply:
But the problem is that you don't know how long the chip will be available and it is not standard and multi sourced, like a 22v10.
-- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Thanks, i had been kind of wondering where the devices in the low range of the CPLD families might be. Most of the time i still need 5V compatibility though. I could have used the smallest of these instead of a few 22v10's for a recent design.
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