Most obnoxious USB hub ever

Yes, I experienced a LED like this elsewhere, and it was *$&% ( ANNOYING. To make it worse, it was a high brightness LED and also flashed different random colours at blinding intensity and time delay.

While I first thought it might have been some indicator as to the unit's operation, it turned out that it was just shoved across the +5 rail, with a suitable dropping resistor. just ONE of these was bad enough, let alone 8 ! Seems some small minds get excited over things like this as a "must have" in every product.

Wire cutters solved the problem, though a bog standard low brightness LED would have been a better choice for the design.

Have you seen some of the similar irritating LED lighting in some of the PC fans these days ? I can just imagine how good illuminated flashing, colour changing fans would be in a media centre PC setup in the lounge room while trying to watch a movie in a darkened room ;)

Unfortunately, it appears to be a trend. I've seen a wireless router with the same random flashy thing on top, I thought it was indicative of network traffic or something.

Alas no. On the upside, in this case, via the setup, they could be disabled.

I think this sort of stuff is aimed at the new set of users. The sorta person that has perspex side covers on their computer and neons under the car etc etc. The manufacturers follow their percieved markets, dinos like us are not part of that scene :-)

Rheilly P

Ah, I saw one of these at work and I actually thought it was an activity LED.. Thanks for the heads up..!

Regards,

Ross..

True dinos do not use usb {:-).

I had a look at the 2 x IC's used:

All of the LEDs are 2 legged devices, and the centre flashing LED appears to display possibly up to 8 variations of colour. A rather interesting device.

But none of the 8 LEDs are status LEDs of any description.

A screw driver inserted near the USB connector, snaps the cover off easily.

There is a labeled bridge link near each port, cutting this stops not only the LED, but also the port from working, so it may well be +5V. Didn't bother diving in too deep.

Looks like if the LED activity annoys me too much, I have to snip out 7 LEDs, and leave one port LED there for power status.

Boy, they are very bright!!

Cheers Don...

Are we talking morse code, pigeons, drums, or even smoke, for real dinos?

d:-)

-- Don McKenzie

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I recently changed my Lexmark E310 from parallel to USB, did not make it go faster though. Actually only discovered the USB port on it this year. Been in possession of it since May 2000. Dinos do use USB, just takes a while thats all.

The LED's may have a current limiting resistor that you can snip out instead.

Then take one back and say that the status lights don't work.

Heh, I'm trying to keep the smoke IN !!

Rheilly P

Oh, I thought we were talking computer dino as opposed to communications dino.

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:16:58 +1000, Don McKenzie put finger to keyboard and composed:

I saw something like that on Flying High II. IIRC, William Shatner tells the technician to try getting the lights to blink in sequence.

- Franc Zabkar

I recently logged into a favourite IRC channel using a 4kb computer from

Dr. Sir John Howard, AC, WSCMoF"

Lol, just keeping the old skills honed hey?

In my case I laid 2" water pipe to the shed a couple of decades ago and pulled about eight multipair (of 8 pairs?) serial cables through the pipe, but have done nothing with them since. So it was just a matter of using what is there.