Frosting LED's

[Spawn-Inc]

i'm 98.234234% sure that this would work but want to know if you can frost a LED by sanding the top. i have some 2000 grit sand paper and some 5mm blue and green LED's i just got from lsdiodes.com (great site BTW). i wasn't thinking at the time when i placed my order but i was going to replace my power and hdd light respectively. i was thinking i can put the LED genlty in a drill and spin it on the sand paper to get a frosted look. would i be able to cut the top flat too?

[Bucko]

yes and yes.
You can sand down LEDs to make a round LED fir a square hole. Just don't go too far...

[Olen]

If you look in you can see the working bits by looking in. Don't go too close and all should be fine. Even if you do go too close LEDs don't cost much.

You get LEDs in frosted, square, everything imaginable cases anyway.

[Spawn-Inc]

i was going to replace my green and red/orange rectangular Leds with some blue and some other colour. i ended up getting another green because i didn't really think about it. i order 5mm led so it gave me just enough to cut away at it and make it rectangle. then i burnt one out with a 9v battery. i've used 9v batteries to power led before with no problems but maybe i got to close to the light. so it went from bright blue to dim red to smoke. i ended up using a blue and ultraviolet led but i'm going to change the ultraviolet led the next led order i place.

[Redundant]

i've used sandpaper on LEDs too; works fine. :)


then i burnt one out with a 9v battery. i've used 9v batteries to power led before with no problems but maybe i got to close to the light.
You know, LEDs are meant to use between about 2.8v and 4.5v. Some (read: industrial, like in appliances) LEDs have built in resistors or your 9v battery died enough to get below 5v.

I like to test LEDs with CR2048 button cell batteries. You can easily slip the two electrodes around the battery without bending them and the batteries last a good amount before needing replacement. :up:

[tybrenis]

Absolutely. The tops are just made from acrylic.

However, 2000 grit won't frost them - thats what I use to polish acrylic... =D

[Spawn-Inc]

ya after sanding it with 2000 it looks good but then i wiped away the dust and it was pretty much still clear. i was going to drill a round hold and just use the 5mm led instead of the rectangle one but decided to cut the round into a rectangle. the cutting disc made nice frosted look so that was a bonus. i would take pictures but its all glued in place.

[tybrenis]

Absolutely. The tops are just made from acrylic.

However, 2000 grit won't frost them - thats what I use to polish acrylic

[Spawn-Inc]

you a robot or something?!? whats with the same thing being said?

[b4i7]

the second time he wasnt as happy...note the absence of a smily face...

[crazybillybob]

With LEDs you can use fingernail clippers to remove the little lip around the bottom (in case you need to get them really close to one another), and you can sand them to just about any shape with a needle file or some 120 grit paper ( if you want to give it a fine grain frosting use some 220 or 300) . You always need a resistor on the LED!!! There are tons of calcs and wizards on the net to tell you what value to use for the voltage...I'll not bore you with the math just go find one with Google.

The other thing if your going to use allot of LEDS (50-100) for a project or various projects, check out ebay! there's good guys selling them from HK, you'll have then in a few days (5-10) and you can get ultra brights 6000mcd for $0.10ea (that blue, white, red, green, some time even uv). It will save you allot of money! I think I ordered something like 300 last time and only found 2-3 DOA!
It's worth the cost to have them shipped!

CrazyBillyBob
Humble Astromech Engineer