I have asked this in sci.electronics.repair and got several answers, but no= ne exactly what I was looking for. So per the suggestion of people on that = NG, I'm asking here.
I'd like to purchase large rectangular LEDs like those that were used in th= e ancient Commodore 1571 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives...
Red and green would suffice.
Are these still manufactured and any US mail order where I can order some?
Pics from my Amiga 1200:
Those are marked "LED 1" "LED 2" and "LED 3" on a small PCB hooked by 4 wir= es to the A1200 motherboard. Now, tearing apart and crippling Amiga 1200 co= mputers doesn't sound like my idea of fun to source these large LEDs. ;)
For comparison's sake, I included a US quarter coin on one of the pics.=20
If you look at picture #3, you will see these are not the usual "translucen= t piece of plastic in front of a regular LED" but actually these were manuf= actured as a single piece, you cannot "detach" the leads from the plastic, = and the connection pins appear from within the rectangular plastic block. T= hat leads me to believe these LEDs were mass manufactured...
-----WHY OH WHY?----- (if you don't care why I'm seeking those, feel free t= o skip this section).
On desktop-bound PCs, LEDs had a purpose: to give a visual clue about what = is going on with a certain system component. So if the software had an unex= pected pause but you saw a LED blinking on the CD-Reader you said to yourse= lf "ok, it' s reading data from the CD". Or, coversely, when there was a pa= use in software or you started a disk-intensive operation and let it run in= the background you could look at a PC and say "oh, it's still doing disk I= /O... the background job has not finished yet".
Plus, LEDs were easily viewable because Destkops were, as its name implied,= on top of DESKS, so just by looking at the side of the monitor, there usua= lly was the PC with its HDD actvity LEDs.
Nowadays, my PC is a mid-tower server tucked under the desk. So while the M= OBO still provides a "HDD activity" led, it' s about 5 inches from the floo= r level and so tiny and slightly inside the case that it is viewable only a= t such angle that I'd have to lay on the floor to see it. That's when this = idea of installing large LEDs on top of the case started, as I remembered I= never had a problem seeing disk activity on either my 1571 FDDs or my Comm= odore Amiga....
If you still think this is a silly idea, consider why people write SOFTWARE= to simulate the HDD led blinks on screen widgets or using the keyboard LED= s...
"How to move your HDD leds to some more visible position using keyboard LED= s"
"Windows HDD systray indicator"
However, since I run several different OSs, I' d like my "solution" to be h= ardware, not software based...
----end of the "WHY" explanation----
So, some nice fellow on sci.electronics.repair pointed to 10mm round LEDs a= vailable at Radio Shack,
TIA for any pointers... FC