On 1/6/06, Mark Scoville wrote: > > 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. I'm sure you also had some NEDs there (Noise Emitting Diodes). Bill -- Psst... Hey, you... Buddy... Want a kitten? straycatblues.petfinder.org -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist