Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/01/this-guy-hand-makes-and-sells.html
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wait a minute, this is a “Giant LED” but the actual Light Emitting Diode at the center is a normal LED. Everything is 10X scale except the part that is emitting the light.
So this is a “model” of an LED. Or did I miss something here?
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Anything larger than a 5mm LED is usually just a 5mm LED in a larger housing.
When a giant LED reminds you of your childhood:
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It actually emits a whole lot of 6250 nm light. He scaled everything!!
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Yeah, I was expecting a scratch-built LED that used a big slice of semiconductor or something, too.
When I think of a “model” (in the sense of a re-scaled display object), I expect all the parts of the thing to be equally scaled. Which isn’t the case here. So surely that makes it a (regular-sized) LED with just a giant housing that resembles a scaled-up LED? (Yo dawg, I heard…)
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I want a giant breadboard, a giant 555 chip, and giant resistors and capacitors! Would settle for giant alligator clips.
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And I wonder where you will clip those.
Dirty ticket.
Exactly. I too feel rick-rolled by this headline.
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To alligators,duh.
#thanksForTheSetUp
I know where you can get the giant 555.
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You’re in luck.
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/555-kit/
And it’s functional, too.
(Looks like @RexDart beat me to it.)
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I don’t have an authoritative list of ‘standard’ die sizes(if they have even been standardized); but higher wattage LEDs are almost always physically larger dies(or multi-die packages being sold by aggregate output, 3-5w almost certainly larger die; eBay special ‘100w’ almost always array+optimism). From the pictures on the page this certainly appears to be a smaller LED mounted in a big diffuser; but it looks like a surfacemount in the punchier-than-5mm size.
Some fine person put together a small list of LEDs and die sizes, by way of reference.
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That is amazing!
Approves
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so we have all discussed our disappointment at it not being a sized up one for one component clone of a smaller and some have come forward to show us all how anything larger than 5mm is usually a clump of 5mm, so I wonder (and sorry if I missed it in the comments) is a larger sized LED even doable?
just wondering if the physics would make the electricity needed too much or would it need too much compensation for heat, etc.
I think it is mainly because of the thermal issues. Even with very active cooling, 5 x 5 mm LEDs are a bitch to keep cool at higher drive currents, whereas an array of 1 mm diodes that’s 5 x 5 is pretty easy to keep happy.
It’s very do-able to power very large arrays, so I don’t think it’s just about the power supply.
ETA: It’s also about the distribution of electrical power on the diode. Since LEDs are semiconductors, the voltage drop across a large LED is significant. In order to feed current evenly across a large surface, you’d need to form a grid of power distribution across the surface in order to even out the voltage drop. As a result, your conductor grid would block out a lot of the LED’s light. This is avoided on small LEDs by wire bonding with tiny little conductors. Less light is blocked by opaque metal conductors that way.
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thanks for the helpful detailed reply =D
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