> Of Randy Glenn
>
> There's nothing like the smell of burning LEDs in the morning...
>
> At my University, my friends and I were selling parts kits for the
> Microelectronics 1 course. One particularly brilliant group came by,
> bought their kit, and proceeded to plug their only red LED directly
> into mains. They were slightly more surprised at the explosion than
> they were at the revelation that we wouldn't replace the LED for free.

Where I work several of the other engineers and myself were kicking around
the idea of using the inductive reactance of a capacitor to limit the
current to a bi-polar LED so we could run it directly from 120Vac. We were
all worried what would happen if the capacitor shorted and applied 120Vac
directly across the LED... So we tried 120Vac right across the LED... the
result was the emission of plastic LED fragments... We had witnessed the
birth (or re-birth) of the the PED - Projectile Emitting Diode. A distant
cousin of the DED - Dark Emitting Diode.

We just kept trying again and again - and the same darn thing happened every
time. It was a slow Friday afternoon and a lot of LEDs died a spectacular
death that day.

-- Mark



-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist