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Thread: adding LED's

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  1. #1
    Member danthemanohhyea's Avatar
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    adding LED's

    hi everyone, i appoligize if this has been asked before, but this forum seems to be cleaned out often of old stuff..

    anyway, how could attach a single LED to my power supply? Would i need resistors or anything and if so what ones would i need? Thanks for any help you can give!

  2. #2
    Senior Member naptownman's Avatar
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    LED's have a forward voltage drop of about 1.6 or 1.7 volts. They also have a maximum current that they can pass before the heat dissipation gets too high and they fry. Let's assume for convenience that the current will be 20 milliamps. In order to use them to monitor a voltage on a power supply you will need a resistor.

    To calculate the rsistance needed, take the voltage you are going to power it from and subtract 1.7 volts. Divide this by the current in amps and you get resistance in Ohms. Or divide by miliamps and you get resistance in kOhms.

    For example, you want to monitor 5 volts. You take 5, subtract 1.7 and get a difference of 3.3. Divide this by 0.020 (30 milliamps expressed in amps) and you get 165 Ohms. This isn't a standard value but 168 Ohms is.

    The next thing you want to make sure of is the power rating of the resistor. Square the current flow (.02 x .02) and you get 0.0004. Multiply this times the resistance and you get 0.066 watts. So a 1/8 watt resistor will be more than adequate for this example. The formula for power is I (amps) squared times the resistance.

    For a 12 volt rail you would need 515 Ohms at 0.205 watts.

  3. #3
    Senior Member naptownman's Avatar
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    Sorry for the confusion: Where I said "for example you want to monitor 5 volts" replace the reference to 30 milliamps to read 20 milliamps. 0.020 is 20 milliamps expressed as Amps. It's late and I had too many 3's with the voltage of 3.3 volts! I had three's on the brain.

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    Member danthemanohhyea's Avatar
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    i hate to be a pain the the rear end but i'm not too smart with all that electrical stuff, so much of what you said doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me. However what i got out of the end is that i need to get a 515 Ohm resistor with the LED when its hooked up to the 12V rail?

    Also, a while ago i swapped out the standard LED's in my case (power and HDD activity) for blue ones and just put them in. Do i need to put resistors on those as well to prevent damage to my power supply or something of that nature?

  5. #5
    Senior Member naptownman's Avatar
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    Go to a Radio shack and ask for a resistor around 515 ohms if you want to monitor 12 volts. 510 Ohms is the closest standard value. And don't forget LED's are polarized but you probably know this after changing them in your PC case.

    You don't need to add resistors when you change the LEDs in a case because the resistors are already mounted on the motherboard.

  6. #6
    Member danthemanohhyea's Avatar
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    yep i know that they're polarized, but which end would i solder the LED onto? or doesnt it matter

  7. #7
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    Theres three ways of achieving this .....

    1.Some fans are "Smart" so they rotate faster the warmer the ambient temp becomes automatically. Click

    2. A fan with a high low switch (Cheap nasty idea)

    3. A fan speed controller & a standard dumb fan Click



  8. #8
    Member Newbie2's Avatar
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    You call standard fans dumb?

  9. #9
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    yeah


  10. #10
    Member Newbie2's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by j.m@talk
    yeah
    Why?

    Because they are plain black and have no nice features?

  11. #11
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    If you are any good at wiring there are even cheaper alternatives tho ....... Pends really what it is you want to do


  12. #12
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    No cos all they do is spin ... or not ..... No AI ...... Anyways what ya gonna do with your cooling issues ?


  13. #13
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    Sleeve bearings tho ......... Ya needs ball bearing fanz ........ Thems the kiddies


  14. #14
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    So my Kensington Piliot mouse has a piece of plexiglass in the top so i can see the word kensingtom on a peice of plastic below. to my great delight i found that if i carve a hole into the peoce with the word kensington i can see throught all the way tot the inads of the mouse and have a peice of clear plastic over it too. so i decided one day to try to fing a blue LED light... easier said than done on account i was 16, with no checking account and no way to buy stuff online. and the closest store with led's is 50 miles away... great fun no? so i tore apart an LED flashlight and took out the light, put noth ends onto a fuse inside the mouse, sodered it in there (tested it out first of course) and now my mouse had a stream of blue light coming out of the top in a beam just as bright as an LED flashlight would be. it's also really cool to look inside becasue you see a swirling dark area in all the blue light, it makes me soo happy..

  15. #15
    Complete & Utter Member j.m@talk's Avatar
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    Your gonna be the Prez one day


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