The First Light Emitting Diodes
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- Опубликовано: 20 дек 2013
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A love letter, straight from my heart - to the beautiful Light Emitting Diode! In this vlog I go deep into my collection and show some of the very first LEDs ever made, review them in context of the history of LED's, and also show some of the coolest and weirdest kinds of LEDs that you'll see around. This one is for hard-core geeks and dweebs only! Thanks for watching...
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In the mid 1970's I was in High School, and had subscriptions to every amateur electronics magazine you could name.
The buzz about LED's had been around for a while, but they were lab curios, operating in pulsed mode at reduced temperatures. And mostly infrared.
Then the commercial units appeared, and I had to have one.
The glorious day came when the local Radio Shack had its first visible red LED!
It cost about $8.50 in 1974 dollars!
I saved my money, mowed some yards, and bought the darn thing.
I hooked it up to the power source, and marveled at the ruddy glow!
Here was light, being created at the atomic level! Quantum stuff in your hand!
It was magical, and I still feel that sense of wonder from time to time.
ungratefulmetalpansy And now Dream Crusher version 1.0 is available at your local walmart!
I was like this when blue and white ones came out. I had to have them, did nothing with them, just had to have them and light them up!
I can relate in some way however its much more modern for me. I heard about UVC LEDs but when they became available they costed like $200-600 for a punny LED of about 1mW output in a TO can package with a quartz window, too expensive for me. Fast forward about 10 years I finally got a UVC LED for $80 and it gives about 40mW of 270nm light, i was so happy when i got it and I wanted to turn it on, it has a whitish turquoise glow but that's just stray light the UV its totally invisible but it makes paper and CFL phosphor glow, also if you point it to a dirty surface it starts to smell weird, it has a quartz lens and its very fragile, somehow accidentally chipped a corner, luckily its just a small chip and still works, obviously this is harmful light so no exposure of skin or eyes.
It's really nice to appreciate this stuff from time to time!
Didn't bulbs produced the same "quantum stuff" in 1970? 🤣🤣
Can I just say how adorable it is that you have a favourite LED
Yes what a wonderful woman she is
@@terranovarain6570 💡
Doesn't everyone?
I love them too, Fran.
In fact, I secretly call them *_Love Emitting Diodes!!_*
you're cute, call me.
@@baconology You're creepy, don't call me.
@@taunteratwill1787 Word.
He's not creepy, i love LEDs too ❤️
These are beautiful LEDs as well as interesting historical "artifacts". It's amazing to compare these to neo pixels or the LED lightbulbs that are becoming common now.
I remember the first time I read about blue LEDs in Wired. It was such an amazing breakthrough!
seeing frans smile as she geeks out hard makes me smile
When Fran smiles the whole of geekdom smiles with her!
thank you for making this, I have an old LED collection too, few understand the magic
@@ForumCat you said it bud!!
Blue LEDs sure fascinate me. I tinkered a bunch with breadboards as a kid in the late 90s, and one day my grandfather brings home a blue LED for me. Never saw anything like it, there were no blue lights in consumer products. Seeing them in this video still brings a little nostalgia.
The first Blue LED I saw was amazing!!! Color SO VIVID. So pure blue! There was never anything like it.
Just love LEDs too, it was genuinely exciting going to Radio Shack in the 80s and getting an assortment of random red, green, and yellow LEDs. Also amazing to see the continual progression of super bright red LEDs, it seemed impossible that they got so bright. The first blue LED I ever saw was in a diffused white package, very dim but so surreal after a life of red and green or yellow for so long!
As a career electronic geek, and working with LED signage on the daily, seeing some of these early units is really cool.
I have to attribute LED's to my introduction into electronics, playing with dads junk box.
thanks for showing us your collection, greatly appreciated
Hello :) I have some soviet era LEDs :) they are really cool. And some produced in Bulgaria too. During cold war Bulgaria used to produce microprocessors and their first computer Pravetz II. Greetings from Bulgaria.
You should check out msylvain59's channel. Lots of interesting Soviet era teardowns. Cheers!
Cool!
@carl hernandez a now that was a cheep shot!! }: (
As you are probably aware Fran, if you shine a light source on an LED, it will generate electricity much like a solar cell. Red LEDs are more sensitive to red light, Green are more sensitive to Green light, and depending on how the Blue is manufactured, they are more sensitive to blue light. This means that you can take an RGB LED and shine white light on it... and have the leads connected to the A/D input of a microprocessor. Then you read this level and presume it to be this highest level... scale it to 255... with no light being 0... and you have a color sensor. Something interesting to play with.
Very interesting!
_"Happyness is a 10 pound bag of 7segment LEDs"_ (Fran Banche)
Happiness...is a warm light...
I remember having an early LED display calculator. I opened it up and saw one of those circular rheostats which when adjusted actually changed the clock speed! You could slow it down so much that you could see in slow motion the scanning of the 7-element LED number displays an element at a time. You could also overclock, which reduced battery life, but gave you faster results. (Themdays a SQR request would take a cuppla seconds to calculate(!), due to both limited hardware and poorly optimised algorithms).
I noticed as a kid when I listened to my crystal radio in the middle of the night, I could actually see a very tiny feint light coming out of the detector diode. I thought that was cool. Awesome collection!
I thought that was an illusion. I used a 150 foot long wire horizontal clothesline antenna. Howard Sams pushed a one transistor class A amp circuit I think it was CK722 or 2N107
@21:24 .. And for decades I thought I was the only "weirdo" who found certain 'pretty' components simply pleasing to look at and touch.
Back on Christmas of 1975 I got a Radio Shack LED calculator. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. My Mom had an earlier TI LED unit but mine had FUNCTIONS!
@Fran Blanche
If my memory serves me correctly, that TO92 IS actually a working transistor. It would light up to indicate the transistor is in use. I had my hand on a few of these back in the late 80's.
If that is true, They would be very usefull. I mean you can beild e.G. a Ne555 out of those transistors and see how the ic works
It would be interesting to see that type of setup in action.
+Dwayne Madden I thought it might be a HEMT (high-electron-mobility transistor) used for high gain, high frequency with low noise. The visible characteristic would be an added benefit.
Would love to see it plugged into a component tester, producing a diagram and other data. It would also flash while being tested.
Dwayne Madden I first saw my first LED tv in a large co-op in Derby, UK. I was 12, so it would have 26 years ago. Now, I understand that they were used well before this, but this was the first of the many flat screens to come, that I had ever seen. But, let me tell you.....The picture quality was brutal, it was so bad in fact that my friend and I had to stand almost the full diagonal length of the store to see that they were showing a football match! All for the princely sum of £3000! I honestly couldn't believe that something like this (at the time) would be the future of modern technology, eg monitors/tvs/phones/touchscreen technology, all lighting throughout my home, to name but a few.....The list is MASSIVE.
I was glad to see this cool video....I really enjoy this persons dialogue, she is an interesting person.
You're making me all nostalgic. I bought my first LED's from Radio Shack as a kid in the late 70's - "jumbo" (5mm) reds. I still have them in a large tackle box with thousands of newer ones. I also have a 70's green LED with a red die inside, although I discovered in high school electronics that, with sufficient voltage, a green LED will light up orange for a second before exploding. I had a Western Electric Trimline phone with one of those unusual green LED's behind the dial. The color was different enough that I didn't know it was an LED until I opened it up. Ill never forget my first sight of a SiC blue LED - a sky-blue color that isn't seen in newer ones. Regarding unusual shapes of 70's LED's, my favorite were the ones with a faceted top. Great memories!
This video is heaven. I've always felt the same way about LEDs. As a kid Radio Shack was my second home mostly because of them. I would buy them and stick them in things with dead watch batteries which still had enough power for them any chance I got. At a summer camp we were supposed to draw a picture and stick the little ornament incandescent bulbs in them and I brought some LEDs from home and used those instead haha. Then as an adult when automotive LEDs started becoming a thing I replaced every single bulb and light fixture with LEDs. Then when LED light bulbs kicked off replaced every single bulb in the house with LEDs. LEDs are amazing! Instant subscriber!
Tandy (Radio Shack in the UK) used to sell packets of assorted LEDs, all kinds of weird and wonderful designs like ones with Fresnel lenses. I used to love getting those, and still have some. Kept waiting for a blue one, but by then Tandy had gone.
I loved those little packets of assorted LEDs! It was a great way to get a bunch of different kinds of LEDs without having to buy them individually (plus the fact that sometimes they contained ones they didn't even sell individually). I believe I still have most of them somewhere as well.
I have a few LED battery-operated dome lights, which I covered with wax paper to diffuse them. They are now easier on the eyes.
I used to have a lot of LED's (early ones) when I was a kid... but none as old as some of these. :D
I remember thinking "Why don't they make flashlights out of these?" and i had even made some of my own (probably inefficient) lights from them.
Well, here we are in 2017 and every bulb is an LED unless you go hunting for an 'old fashioned' one to be a hipster.
I don't know why I am watching this at three in the morning... anyways, very interesting lesson about leds so... thumb up! 21:39 - I'd make a ring, or a pendant out of it - it's so beautiful!! and there's something for you: once I stole an led from the place where I work. There were some leds every now and there, over some doors, maybe for emergency/fire signalling purpouses, I don't know because I've never seen one light up (fortunately, you might say). Some doors had a green led on, some had one yellow and one green, and some others a red one too. The fact that caught my attention was that those leds were HUGE - I mean, each led was like 3 cm in diameter. So I disassembled three of them (I used them as a mod on a computer case), and the strange thing was that each led had a GND connector plus 2 or 3 other pins, and connecting more pins, the led got brighter... don't know if you ever stumbled upon them.
From loving a single dim led to watching the videos of those collections 50 year later on a display made of advance Light emitting diodes is so fascinating :)
I have tens of thousands of leds here. They are amazing little devices.
It is a wonder that I don't have "led poisoning", considering how often I use these in projects :) .
CNCmachiningisfun What a privilege :) Good for You. Poisoning no but LEDaholic for sure :)))
you have thousands .... what about i have aro 2 MM pcs ..?
(well, we sell leds... that is the reason ...)
LED's are amazing !! right ?
Yes indeed, you have enough LEDs to light up the darkest of places :) .
There's no doubt about it, you are addicted to LEDs.
+CNCmachiningisfun:
You might get arsenic poisoning if you open them and burn the GaAsP crystal in open air.
@@CNCmachiningisfun There is a song in there somewhere.
Fran, I can't believe you can hold onto stuff for such a long time. I envy your ability to re discover these treasures again and again, that must be truly exciting!
I remember in the year 1986 I hold in my hands the first led I had seen in my life, I was amazed from this kind of technology.
This reminded me of 1983 when I finished a college project firing audio sound via a IR LED at 980 nm - I managed a signal to noise ratio of 90dBm ...amazing how Columbia Uni and their band gap research have created the super bright LEDs we have today. Nice 1, Fran
I always loved LEDs, too. I was enchanted by my aunt’s calculator with the red LED display, and my brother had the Little Professor with a similar display. When I got my electronics kit from Radio Shack I was fascinated by the red LED. I had an active imagination, and looking into it was like looking into another world to me. When I scrapped a VCR or something that had clear LED that put out bright green, it was like I found jewels. I still have those! Then in the 90s when my local discount store started selling blue LED keychain lights, I bought several, along with the red and green, and that was about the time higher intensity LEDs were coming out which were so cool. BTW, I always pronounce it as “led” rather than saying each letter L-E-D, ever since I was a little.
Hi Fran, the first words you said regarding finding LEDs fascinating from an early age totally took me back to when I was about 5 years old and I found a 30 in 1 build your own electronic project kit, I found it at a jumble sale it didn't work I didn't have any other clue about any of the other components but I figured out I could light this tiny little red light when I connected the battery in one particular way! That was the moment and I have had a penchant for taking stuff apart and seeing how it works ever since!
I didn't know or understand any of the other components but at the time I was happy to just stare at this thing for hours! It was at the time the most fascinating thing to look at!
✌️ Of course these days now that I build my own circuits I love LED's because they act as a bridge between me and the user who is reading the information these offer when using one of my gizmos, I don't have to be there, our illuminated friends show what users have to do!
Love your show
Finally
16:55, they don't make them like that anymore tis a thing of beauty.
Kind regards Warren
When blue LEDs were starting to become a reality, I was so excited. Finally RGB can be created with LEDs. Then I saw one and decided it was a really annoying colour for an LED. Suddenly they were the new power indicator for everything and I was bathed in a horrible piercing blue glow in my living room. I stripped them out and replaced them for other colours. So disappointed!
They were so annoyingly bright in the 2000s! I feel like they just dropped in blue in place for red, without increasing the resistance
In the VW model T3 (1979-1992) there was a blue upper beam indicator light in the dashboard. The indicators for oil, battery and blinker were all LEDs (red, red and green) and in early vehicles the upper beam inducator was a yellow LED, but at least in Germany this indicator has to be blue and so in later versions they had to change that yellow LED for a little lightbulb with a blue cap.
When I was little (~5 y.o.) I was always fascinated that they had a blue LED in the dashboard of such an old car. That was around 2000 when blue LEDs just got commonly available. It was a very nice cream blue, almost like a baby blue. I used to hunt that color LEDs in every electronics catalog I could get my hands on. Conrad, Mouser, Buerklin, ... It was when I was looking for it in a replacement parts catalog for the T3 when I found out I had been fooled that entire time.
+John Kapri Haha exact same for me here. I recently had to disassemble the dashboard of our T4 and was wondering too how they got their hands on blue LEDs at the time. I actually laughed at their well covered trickery there. It is done so well that you can barely catch the difference between the LEDs and the bulb.
A similar thing are old measuring devices. We once broke apart an old ground resistance meter from the late 70s during my apprenticeship and were coming across some optocoupler: Actually a light bulb and a photo-resistor covered with a rubber tube. Shows how expensive LEDs were back then because they were reserved for the indicators on the scale where you could see them.
Hahaha I've been wondering for years about the instrument cluster of a Golf Mk2 we had.
John Kapri Lovely comment. I had also the same experience :) Those good old times newer will come back ...
We had a 82 and a 84 passat.mkII. The 82 had a yellow led with blue symbol above for hibeam, the 84 had a blue led.. which someone above says was a lamp with filter. This was in Sweden.
Ronny Svedman
Yes, curious. I know that blue LEDs were invented in the 80s by a Japanese company, and although it is possible it is a incandescent with blue filter, I honestly don't believe that is what was in that Rabbit I had from 1984. I'm almost positive it was an actual blue led.
Thanks Fran. 8 years later. Nothing is EVER wasted. I like your Digg.
You are a true treasure! I can only imagine you as a friend , I would want to listen to you talk for hours .
Thanks, Fran. Brought back some memories. I still got a few of those, some in metal cases with clear tops. I had an early 1970's 1 w red led with domed top with a gold solder tab on a side and a 6-32 bolt through the bottom to heat sink it. I used that as a nosecone light on a model rocket in the early 1970's. It is mentioned in my model rocket video.
"i'm the operator with my pocket calculator"
a quote worthy of the time. i had a Ti unit ;-)
I love the sight of a 1970's era LED refracted and reflected through a faceted plexiglas bezel! A friend of mine (Tullio Proni) and I both made LED pendants for science fiction fans with plexiglas fronts, mirrored plexiglas backs, with small batteries and circuitry behind. We used 555s, LM3909s (invented by Carl Kleiner, another SF fan), or XR-2240 (?) sequencers. About the same time, I got an HP-35 calculator for college. With friends, we played with those LEDs dunked in liquid nitrogen, cranking amps of current through them, until they became plastic-emitting diodes :-) Fond memories.
Thanks for your great RUclips series. Happily subscribed.
Your video was Frantastic!
Years ago ( late 80s to early 90s) I modded several guitar pedals with the addition of LED indicators to indicate when the pedal was turned on, as well as changing out the stomp switches for true bypass when turned off. The LED would also dim slightly as the battery became weaker, a nice feature to have.
Thank you thank you thank you... for the trip down memory lane!
I am 51 and got into electronics when I was about 10 years old. I took my dads super expensive Sharp handheld VFD calculator apart and ruining it. I wanted to see how it worked. At the time, it wasn't "good" for me but in the long run it solidified my love of electronics and later digital electronics that move into the IT field that I am in to this day. Growing up and always being in the more "Rural" setting, I always scrounged around the roads on garbage day picking up old tv's, radio's and other electronics and stripping the parts out of them to create my parts bins... bins that I still have today.
I have MANY of the LED's and numeric displays that you have shown here. I have passed my love of this stuff down to my son. He pushes the electrons around a bit differently and at different levels (he's an electrician) but he has a love of electronics as well. I must dig out my old bins of "stuff" for when he comes over later. We both love trips down memory lane.
Thanks again... keep up the GREAT WORK!!!!
Tim
I love the way you get so excited about this stuff in such an understated way!
I keep coming back to this upload time and time again; it always cheers me up. I love LEDs, and love your videos; so relaxing. Thanks Fran!
Really enjoying your presentations, very informative and you know how to explain well, we see your passion for what you do, and you're a great teacher, I never get bored watching you!
I remember making a pulsating LED display in the mid '90s and wanted something spectacular in the center: a blue LED. It cost $20 and had to be ordered into the local electronics store (remember those?). Two weeks later it arrived and everyone in the store gathered to see it. And at that point I found out that it needed a good 5V or so to light. Which meant adding a 2N3904 on the back of the PCB and drilling some extra holes to drive the blue LED separately.
Wow, brings back memories from my childhood. The spine-tingling sense of exploration came back for a second.
All these older LED devices take me back to my college days (late 1960s and early 70s) and the various electronic projects I built during that time. Thanks for all the memories!
Around 1970 I bought a bag of red LED's from one of those 'Bi-Pak' type of suppliers. They were so dim they were useless for anything except status indicators in a darkened room. Turning up the current didn't make any difference, they just sat there laughing at me. Then came the (just about) usable 'standard' LEDs and then the super-bright and ultra bright, which could actually shine a beam, but the biggest shock came when the genuinely high power types arrived. These were rated in watts and a few years ago a friend and I had great fun with optical voice comms over 3 miles using these LEDs and lenses to form tight beams. Since then, the really dedicated chaps have achieved ranges up to 100 miles.
Hey Fran!
I'm 52 and I was into electronics very young, at 5 or 6 years old I was experimenting with components. L.E.D.'s were my biggest interest, you bring back some great memories!
Hey Fran you have taught your cat to `Meow` when you say the word `De-bouncing!" how cool is that ! whoop whoop !!
Almost as impressive as teaching your cat to say De-bouncing when you say Meow.
that one at 21:20 could be a piece of jewellery
When I was 14 years old, I was a fanatic of electronics, I told people that why dont fabricate Monitors based on LEDS i mean dots per inch was alrady there, pixels etc, we could use leds for that.. people laughed at me...
today... we have LED TVs :-p
Here is how you destroy masterminds, now i am just a lousy filmmaker hahaha (here again, i talked about several cameras before the matrix effect was discovered), again... people laughed :p now we have 360º Cams :p lol
Tino Trivino Yeah, you give them too much honor by calling it that. I saw this effect in TV commercials years before the film.
I had been sort think the same thing. When I was taking a digital electronics class, I had thought about building a computer using a display with an LED matrix.
There were (big) displays of discreet LEDs. The main issue with building a consumer level device is consistency and reliability. You're packing together the better part of a a million LEDs and if even one is dead, that's a display you have to trash. It's taken a lot of advancement in process to get this far.
The best LED TV in the world is useless without good *content*. The world doesn't really need "better" televisions, but we desperately need better content! So, stick to film-making! PS, you appear to have an Italian name; some my favorite movies are Italian. Cinema Paradiso; Queen of Hearts; and the recent CopperMan, all wonderful.
I, too, have one of the tiny metal cased Monsanto leds. It still works... dimly. No idea where I acquired it from, it was many years ago. I had no idea it was one of the first available until watching your video, so now I know I have a tiny piece of led history. Thanks Fran. Those early 7 segs used to often fail, I remember advising a colleague to use sockets, the inevitable happened.
Thanks Fran. I love 'em too! We sure have seen some remarkable developments in our days.
wow what a great presentation! very cool. Thanks for sharing!
I have some of those old ones too! Fun. I grew up watching the advances and so amazed and entranced.
I’m a kid of the 80s, and I was first pulled into electronics by those blinking red, green, and yellow lights. The PlayStation 2 with its blue LED blew my mind. And now I use thousands of them in stage performance projects, so I guess the love of them stayed with me too.
When I feel down I must remember your outlook. Thanks Fran... wondering at the light emitted from my hand held touch screen.
these Fran videos are really excellent
Brilliant! I watched this on my QLED TV, cast from my AMOLED phone. There's a Cronixie clock under the TV, I haven't replaced a light bulb in 5 years, my bicycle lights are as intense as car headlights but run for hours on a small battery... so LEDs are pretty amazing.
That was awesome! I LOVE all that historical stuff, and electronics, and pretty lights, and all that neat stuff. I'm so glad I found your channel. Much love. ;D
17:03 I had a genuine moment of understanding. Thank you Fran!
I remember as a kid trying to read a book with a single yellow 5mm LED in the 80s, what was I thinking.
LEDs were just a curiosity for me until the SMD LEDs such the Crew XR-E blew 5mm LEDs out of the water. A totally different world.
The XHP70.2 is currently my favourite LED as it is so efficient.
I was born in soviet union and my father used to be an electric engineer. He had lots of military-grade soviet LED's that I used to play with when I was a child. And gosh, they were so cool. They werent terribly bright and didn't have any fancy colors, but their build quality and robustness were just over the top. Marvels of overengineering: tiny metal casings, super-fine copper wires with fiber-reinforced heat-resistant insulation, glass lenses instead of plastic, glass potted, etc. I'm sure you'd love them.
Thanks to the success of your clips on the BINA VIEW, the algorithm brought us the video of your amazing collection of old LEDs! Double thumbs up for this!
I've got some DataSAAB 7-segment LEDs (yes, THAT SAAB company). When SAAB decided to do their own jet fighter, they had to start from zero, and make a computer first. The computer was from 1971, with core memory, and it was used at the local bank well into the 80s. We got to take it apart when it was decommissioned, which is where I got the LED from. As far as I know, the majority of the components ended up in someone's model railroad controller.
That Was Awesome Fran. Very Cool Collection...! Keep up the great work. Nick.
"it's beautiful"
*It is hard to argue with that assesment*
A friend of mine has an old Bridgeport milling machine with power feed on X and Z and the power feed units have first-generation LEDs on them. They still light up to this day, although very dimly; they are used as power indicators.
Really enjoyed the vid. and I know nothing about this stuff. Gonna be a history teacher and I love how you have context of what it was like to have these back then.
My ex-'s Dad worked for GE and in 1969 brought home a variety of LEDs which I got to play with. He held a patent on some of the first ones.
A ten pound bag! I am just starting to build my collection and can't get enough LEDs. Thank you so much for your content Fran.
You're a remarkable woman.
Fran, you are neardy, fun, intelligent and a little bit creapy... and I love it!
Thank you very much for your video and sharing your ideas in such a creative way.
Hehe! You get the same way I do when I look at old LED displays where you can see the little whiskers to the dies. Just so awesome.
Just realized I've watched this at night on an LED-backlit screen, in a room I recently switched to all LED lighting, so pretty much all the light in here came from LEDs...
I finally got to see this video, thanks Fran. Really like that music at the end as well.
I love all the stuff you teach us :)
That's fantastic that you have kept them.
In the past, I have collected a bunch of white leds and I have no idea where they are to this day but I might get a box of colored leds for my birthday.
I am a fan this technology and probably will be for the rest of my life to come, awesome collection!
Informative as all ways!
I think it was back in the 1990s, Siemens had some ads in the most common technology magazines for engineers where they ask the readers for the need of blue LEDs. It seemed, they saw the huge amount in investments to develop these.
Thank you so much for this in-depth intro into the early LED years. I was fascinated (as you were) by my first sight of a calculator sporting a LED-display. My first LED I owned was a simple mid-80's red led and my 2nd LED was a tricolor one.
I was a bit surprised that you did not mention that type in your overview. That one made a big impression on me.
I Love how mindful and appreciative you are.
I really enjoy learning the history of the various aspects of electronics.
Love your videos.
You are awesome Fran, truly a real gem.
Peace.
-Ben
:D
I like vintage components.
When you look at a PCB from the 80s or something, it's cool how you can see each component.
If you look at a modern PCB, it's just all green, with a few black ICs.
Totally LOVE this last quote of yours!
Nice video again, Fran. It led me to getting old boxes and digging througt my LED collection.. and yes, is also still have the first LED i bought in the mid 70ties :-)
I took apart my calculator at 7yo , and was in AWW that the leds were , gray when off , and strikingly red when on , I remember my hand held battery powered florescent lamp made interesting , sounds when placed next to my am radio, so I tried with it with the LED calculator .. Mind blown with a harmony of tones . as I eased drop on the RF sounds a calculator makes .. Very Cool !!!
Back in the 70's, I bought one of those at a TG&Y five-and-dime. If memory serves, it had a *fixed* decimal. If you put it next to an AM radio, the radio would make a lot of noise.
Throughly enjoyed this Fran, I’m also fascinated by LEDs! Thank you 😊
33:20 "I'm sorry Fran, I'm afraid I can't do that"
Fran, congrats for keeping them alive for us to see. You have a little goldmine there :). Not too many of us are fond of keeping history alive nowadays.
Hope to see you posting new videos soon, to enchant our senses.
Your such a dork, Im so in love hehe, I used to have boxes of salvaged components from my destructive learning phase (teen years) but each piece was it's own blissfulness, you could feel it and inspect it and dream of uses for it, you are so right about happiness! So happy I could listen and watch you play with such interesting things, it's almost as good as doing it myself! Keep it up!
"Happiness is a 10lb bag of seven segment LEDs" - ah Fran, thats adorable in a way only us nerds can relate. Thanks so much this was a great video taking me back to my project days when radio shack sold stuff that you could make entire electronic projects with from the ground up. I always wondered about what was different about that emerald green LED, I had those and looked for them rather than the hazy green ones because I thought they were so much cooler in my projects that needed LEDs.
I worked in a stereo repair shop for the past 16 years; it was extremely rare to see an original LED (stereo indicator etc) die out, but I worked on a Kenwood receiver with a dead LED in the tip of the dial pointer, secured with the same corrosive glue used to hold capacitors to the PC boards. It was a bitch to remove all that glue from the wiring channel of the pointer, and although we had hundreds of different LEDs in stock, even the smallest red LED I could find was just a little too large and I had to file away some of the plastic from the sides of it so that it would fit.
It is now very common to see refurbished vintage stereo receivers on RUclips where the original incandescent lamps have been replaced with LEDs.
Although we frequently did this on our own customer's equipment, the problem we often encountered was that LEDs typically emit nearly all of their light from the tops and very little from the sides, as opposed to an incandescent lamp where the light emission is much more omni directional. We often found ourselves setting the new LEDs farther back so they wouldn't "beam", or adding various translucent materials, color gels, replective aluminum tape, parchment paper and so on in order to diffuse the light and get a good color spectrum, as well as using additional resistors to lower the brightness. The majority of refurbished stereo quipment that I see on RUclips have non-original LEDs that are way way way too bright, with "hot spots" and beaminess for the function indicators and the tuning-dial back-lighting.
The other problem we occasionally encountered is that sometimes the current draw of the lamp, or the non- linear resistance of it, would be part and parcel of a certain circuit, such as the multiplex circuit and the stereo indicator lamp.
Fran, I really dig your appreciation for LED's and things :)
I too absolutely LOVE LED's. I now use the LED chips- nano and pico size. No lens! Just the chip. (About half the size of a pin head). To see this tiny dot glowing so brightly with virtually invisible wires is simply magic.
My first LED was one of the second one you showed.(circa 1972) Yeh, it was dim. I tried putting a lens in front of it and focusing a spot on the wall which could only be seen if the lights were turned off. Later experiments with LEDs of the late 70's I was able to use one to send pulsed light a few feet to a photocell hooked up to my o-scope(without using lenses), altho it was rated at 50ma, the pulses peaked at one amp. The pulses were so short you couldn't see them. And if the rep rate got too high, it would burn it out.
I learned a ton! I totally get the appeal-some of that early circuitry was beautiful in its own quirky ways unique to their eras. Fascinating to know that the calculator displays rely on a timer and human visual permanence-not the most intuitive solution but it definitely seems to simplify things. I always wondered why old LEDs were always red, now I know! I feel deceived that modern LEDs use UV and phosphorus to “cheat” to achieve their color rather than produce them purely. Reminds me of tube TVs with their phosphorus coating or even incandescent lantern mantles. Still a fun solution in its own way. Thanks for doing these.
Oooh, just ran into your channel through EEV-blog.
I am a HUGE fan of leds too!
I love your work ! Thanks a lot.
You are so cool! Thank you for sharing your collection of LEDs. I remember being a kid and collecting LEDs from scavenged electronics and cherishing the blue and weird ones, and nowadays my bins are full of 5050 RGB LEDs with decoder drivers built-in. So cool, how times have changed!
I don't know why this was in my recommended but I'm happy it was.
Good Show, Thanks. I wish I had come to know your series earlier. I hope to find more.
FRAN this is why i LOVE your channel ,,your in to the same geeky stuff im in to !!
Fran I just found your channel it is pretty amazing thanks for the awesome videos