Reminds me of something a prof once told me: Any diode can emit light* once.

* (or smoke, itself, etc.)

-Randy

On 1/6/06, Mark Scoville <mscoville@unicontrolinc.com> 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.
>
> 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
>


--
-Randy Glenn
Computer Eng. and Mgt. Year IV, McMaster University
Industry Liason, McMaster IEEE Student Branch

randy.glenn-at-gmail.com - glennrb-at-mcmaster.ca
randy.glenn-at-computer.org - randy_glenn-at-ieee.org
http://www.randyglenn.ca

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