LED streetlights are decimating moths in England. The LEDs have blue light which insects use to see. The moths are pollinators like bees plus they’re food for many animals. There are a number of solutions for mitigating the problem. The blue light can be filtered out, among other things. My thinking is that the streetlights
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Clive tests three UV-C germicidal lamps to see if they are really putting out UV-C sterilizing light in this 3 minute video. He uses the green banana test. It’s obvious how the cheap LED lights don’t put out any germicidal UV-C. The UV-C wavelengths are blocked by regular window glass or the clear epoxy used
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I found that 100 uH was a good all around value for these solar garden light circuits. But at the time I made these around 2009 the 5252 4 legged chip was uncommon and almost all the garden lights used 2 discrete transistors. I don’t know why they started using the 4 legged 5252 –
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From FB group electronics hobbyists Over the holidays I installed two solar 60 LED lights I bought on eBay. They stopped working just a few weeks after. I finally got up on the ladder and took them down to see why they died. Well, spit! The solar panel is plugged into the jack on the
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From FB comment to Bill Sherman’s candelabra lamps. Bill Sherman Sometimes I wonder what is meant by dimmable. If a LED light uses hundreds of microfarads for the DC filter capacitor, then when the light is dimmed, the long time constant causes it to flash on and off when it is dimmed. So if the
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I’ve had several LED purchases that were LEDs of poor quality, actually factory rejects. The sellers may not have known that the LEDs had “chipped chips” missing a piece, or bubbles or inclusions, but even more commonly, the LED chip is off center so the beam pattern is distorted. I let the sellers know, and
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for FB group Electronics Hobbyists The demonstration of a wireless charging circuit that I built uses a Joule Thief circuit with two yellow LEDs in series. The coil is a hand wound loop about 75 mm or 3 inches diameter. A second loop of gray wire with a white LED (dimly lit at bottom) is
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From FB post about Arduino driving a ‘HC595 chip. You don’t need an oscilloscope to see digital signals. If you slow down the speed, you can see what’s happening by looking at LEDs. Everything is digital, just on or off. Plug two red LEDs, transistors, and current limiting resistors for LEDs (330 ohms), and for
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A detector or discriminator in an electronic device might need to be adjusted to a very few points on a scale of a hundred or more points. A digital indicator typically indicates only a fraction of that, possibly 16 points. This is why the analog meter is still useful: it can indicate a small change
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It has been a long time since I designed Blue Blinky; I just wanted to update it. I have used a 1 uF electrolytic capacitor for the timing capacitor, and it works just fine with the two 680k resistors to give about 1 per second flash rate. I got a bag of hundreds of multilayer
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