Freddy Got Fingered - how did they let that film get made? I'm impressed it got a certificate in the UK. I agree it is terrible, but I have to admit I was in uncontrollable, hysterical laughter by the end, and right now I'm grinning manically at the thought of the "Listen to my hooves" scene

Oh well, back to work with a smile.

"daddy, would you like some sausage?"

It was art. The other movies, like Glitter were just... Well..... shite.

Bruno

But does it have Illuminated Buttons in it?

Hey Brian, I've been doing a little thinking on the diffusion thing...

Now, first off, I don't know what you've tried, and secondly, I have no idea if this is even feasible, but what about adding in fine particles of something semi-reflective into the mix? I'm thinking ultra fine glitter...

A company called Mark Enterprises makes some "Ultra Fine" glitter, that is so insanely tiny, it's hard to distinguish individual particles with the naked eye. And, it comes it in many colors, including glow in the dark!

(OK, so the reason I know this, is because I glitter bombed a girl for valentines day last year... Yeah, I'm a nut.)

Anyway, I still have the bottle it came in, with a little left over in it. And I'm looking at this stuff, and I'm thinking it's worth a shot...

(Random thought #2 - Powdered Aluminum)

- Edit -

To give you an idea of just how tiny ultra fine glitter is, I just did a size comparison...

Crystals of table salt are bigger.

I tried many different things. Like porcelin powder, silver/nickel powder, baby powder, and others. I only got marginal results when the concentration wasn't enought to block light. I'll be thinking about it and trying new things.

I'm guessing that powders mixed into the color are probably the backwards way to go about it.

Have you ever noticed how something with a lighted keypad works? For example, the lighted keypad on a telephone.

It's made of a milky white plastic. Sometimes it's a rubberized flexible plastic. If you just looked at it under normal light, it would look pretty much solid white. But when you put a backlight behind it, it's transparent enough to allow a certain amount of light through.

I'm thinking that you probably want to start, as a basis, with a white plastic and see how translucent you can make it. As opposed to the opposite thing of starting with a clear plastic and seeing how opaque or diffuse you can make it.

I already made one modification to the knob on my player that diffused the light behind the knob significantly. I took some milky white sheet plastic that used to be part of Rio/Nike portable MP3 player package. It was vacu-formed sheet plastic which happened to be translucent white in color. I cut it into the shape of a circle, with a hole in the center that was the same diameter as the shaft for the knob. This fit perfectly atop the knob-board and LEDs, and spreads the light out evenly so that the knob lights almost solid now.

I was unable to do the same thing with the buttons due to their complex shapes. But what I'm thinking is that this kind of milky white plastic material could be the beginning basis for a different style of knob. Perhaps white or even light gray, with just enough translucence to allow the light through. They could simply shine in a gray/white tone, and color could be chosen by an insert over the LEDs themselves.

I am absolutely certain that this kind of plastic exists, as it's used in making the buttons to many car stereos with backlit buttons. Heck, I've still got a Sony CD player whose buttons are made of this kind of plastic. The only question is finding it and seeing if you can use it in your particular mold-making process.

Brian, as soon as this gets worked out I'm in for an order... I'd like to see a color that closely matches the "smoke" colored lens (basically the color of the VFD light itself, a *very* pale sea green) and I really want to wait until the translucency issues are worked out. But when that happens, consider me a customer.

I think you're right here.

If you look at the way that most cars do their buttons or dash illumination, they usually use milky white silicone plastic, with a colored LED behind (or white LED+filter).

Brian, have you thought about contacting the people who make replacement cell phone keypads to find out what compound they are using? I suspect that they are silicone-based too, but you can get diffuse translucent colored keypads for cellphones, so it is possible....somehow.

But as Tony suggested, colorless translucent buttons with a colored filter over the LED may be the way to go. Although you'd have to find someway of putting a filter over the LEDs, I'm sure that it would make the button casting aspect easier for you as you wouldn't have to create different colors for different people.

Have you ever noticed how something with a lighted keypad works? For example, the lighted keypad on a telephone.

I had been thinking along the same lines -- some milky translucent base, maybe with some other light-dispersing element in it (for some reason I have a memory of some glass microspheres used to bulk up epoxy in some applications...)

One thing that occurs to me, though, is that the lighting in some switches and keypads I have taken apart comes from just a little bulb (small, grain-of-wheat-type things, but non-directional) that more generally lights up the area behind the button.

I haven't lit up Brian's LEDs yet, but if they are like most I have seen, they are very directional and there will always be a limit to how much you can make them disperse, especially when they are pressed right up against the material they are illuminating.

Anyhow, yes, Brian, I got my kit and I look forward to illuminated buttons ragardless of how much more dispersed they may become. I appreciate your persistence on this and I will volunteer as guinea pig for whatever button mutations are yet to come!

Last-minute odd thought: Install the LEDs so they point back to the board, not out to the buttons. Purposefully inefficient, yes, but the LEDs would then be illuminating teh buttons/knob with reflected light. Would this even be feasible given the cramped circumstances? If it was, I would volunteer my unit for the experiment. (Of course, this may be pointless if the LEDs aren't directionally biased)...

You're right in that the LEDs are very lens-like and directional.

But I don't think it's feasible to reverse them, and wouldn't help diffuse the light, it would only make the light dimmer but not any more diffuse.

You don't necessarily need incandescent bulbs to do it. I know it's possible to diffused light with LEDs, as my house is full of examples of plain-old directionally-biased LEDs being properly diffused by this milky white plastic stuff I've been describing all along.

Is it possible to dip leds into a liquid silicone to cut the brightness and/or colorize it. I don't know if something like this could be obtained in colors or translucent etc.:

http://www.gesilicones.com/silicones/americas/business/industries/electrical/appliances/antishatter/

I was unable to do the same thing with the buttons due to their complex shapes.

But aren the holes in the backs of the buttons where the switch and LED go in round? You'd have to put your piece of milky plastic at the end of this *round* hole. OK, it's going to be a real PAIN if you ever want to get it out again, but it's worth a try isn't it?

I can't imagine milky coloured buttons looking as good as the current ones, but I guess that is something to try too.

How about changing the plastic in the back of the button to make it concave so that it works a little like a lens to scatter the light? It might not work as well on the top lens that is very convex on the outside, but it may work on the others ...

Some automotive switches, radios and the like also have quite complex prism/light pipe arrangements to spread the light from one source to several different places - I can imagine something like this being used to light up the knob evenly. Would be rather complicated to try and make something like this though!!!

But aren the holes in the backs of the buttons where the switch and LED go in round? You'd have to put your piece of milky plastic at the end of this *round* hole.

I actually tried this, believe it or not.

The problem is that the little holes in the backs of the buttons aren't a simple shape. They are a complex 3D shape that integrates with the switch assembly.

The best that I could do was to use a candle to heat up the white plastic, then "poke" a blunt instrument into the plastic to make it roughly top-of-an-LED-shape. Then the plastic would cool down and I could cut these little white "pimples" off of the plastic. I tried making them have little white "tails" that would scatter the light sideways off to the rest of the button face, but because of the way the buttons integrated with the switch assemblies, I couldn't make this tail large enough or wide enough to scatter the light properly behind the button. In the end, it simply looked like a slightly dimmer LED without much more scattering. And assembling this stuff was a complete pain in the ass, the little white bits would never stay in the buttons properly. I probably could have shaped the plastic more accurately by pushing it against the buttons themselves, but I didn't want to endanger the buttons with heat since I did not have replacements for them.

Then I tried using some translucent white nail polish (my wife happened to have some) on the back side of the buttons. This scattered the light a little bit, but not much, because the layer of nail polish on the back of the buttons was so thin. In order to get the light to properly scatter, the entire buttons would need to be this milky plastic color instead of just a thin layer behind them.

The reason the plastic sheet works for the knob (and it only marginally works, by the way) is because there's three LEDs there.

Tony, try making a blob of 'clear' silicone rubber sealer (Ratshack sell tubes), and then when it's cured try pushing an appropriate sized blob into a button. I've been experimenting with grinding down LEDs to change the focus (marginal results), and for kicks I put a blob on the end of one...and was pleasantly surprised by the diffusion. (The blob is approx 3-4mm thick.) Unfortunately I don't yet have a button kit to try this out with

I suggest starting with a well-cured blob cause you should be able to pull it back out with tweezers, ie non-destructive testing.

I have a hot glue gun that makes nice fast-drying blobs of milky clear translucent glue. That might be worth a try.

How much can you grind off of the end of an LED without hurting it?

How much can you grind off of the end of an LED without hurting it?

Good question. I don't know for sure whether the length of the lens has any bearing on color or not. I don't think so.

Another issue might be heat transfer through the resin that might affect the color..again I don't really know.

(I had 2 blue LEDs, both from RatShack that were supposedly the same....unfortunately I didn't A/B them before grinding, but they are definately different hues now, and I have no idea whether the grinding might have caused this, or just Ratshack being cheap with QC and sourcing!)

Anyway, you should be able to see the semiconductor emitter through the lens. As long as you have a visible layer of epoxy still over that you should be okay.

The bigger issue is that you will need to polish the resin after grinding or the light output csn be attenuated quite substantially. So make sure you have the means to do this (dremels are great things).

Try the blob without grinding the LEDs first if there is room. The silicon is definately more effective than the grinding. And it might be worth investing in a couple of LEDs for practice too

I ground the LED tips with the dremel this evening. Worked very nicely to help diffuse the light. Doesn't turn the buttons magically into flat-lit buttons, but it does increase the diffusion significantly.

Overall light output was reduced slightly, but that's OK because that's what I wanted it to do anyway.

I tried the drop-of-glue thing, but that pretty much just put the LED back to its original lens behavior, so I took the glue off and just have LEDs with flat-ground faces now. Looks great.

Any chance of seeing a before/after comparison?
I just received my kit from Brian yesterday and it would be a lot easier to pre-hack the LED's.

Thanks Tony.

Actually, with the dremel tool, it was very easy to grind the LEDs after they were already installed. Just had to be very careful not to let the spinning bits of the dremel's shaft touch any part of the player while I was doing it.

Don't have any photos to show you at the moment, I'm afraid. All I can say is that griding them made the light more diffuse at the expense of a slight reduction in overall brightness. I did not polish the faces of the LEDs, I left them rough-ground.

Thanks - I'll give them a shot as-is and retro-hack as needed.

I did not polish the faces of the LEDs, I left them rough-ground.

This is an interesting thread!

I'm guessing that when you grind the LED, you add facets to the glass that bounce light in different directions. Re-polishing it would seem to defeat the purpose.

I also like genixia's silicon putty idea. maybe a combination of both? Unmodified, if the LED's light is focused and transmits through an air gap, it wouldn't tend to disperse, but if you can get it to disperse through ersatz facets in the LED, then disperse even further through a silicone gap (instead of air) then that seems promising. Personally, I don't care if the buttons wind up very bright. Subdued would work for me.

Yeah, reversing the LEDs would be a stretch -- might do something on the buttons because of the white plastic surrounds, but not of any use on the SM knob LEDs ('course less of an issue there, I think...).

I took a look at the button LEDs under a microscope and it looks like you could shave at least 1/3 of the glass without endangering the LED internals. I may have to follow genixia's advice and get a bunch of small white LEDs from Radio Shack and experiment.

I second this motion. If a smoked color (no light) and green color (with light) is available I am going to buy it right away! :-D

Calvin

Maybe brian can include square tip leds with the kit?

Calvin

OK got my hack down (actually got four LED's around the volume!).... any way works great except when I turn on my headlights then the lights just kind of blink, I fixed the problem by disconnecting the "lights on wire". I'm curious as to if this is just because my Audi's factory deck automatically compensated dimness levels via a sensor? Or did I just wire something incorrectly? Like I said before everything works great until I turn on the headlights... any ideas?

Mmm.. mine don't do that! Awesome!

Odds are that your Audi uses pulse modulation on its headlight-sense wire.

The empeg player software handles this with some fancy code that watches the headlight-sense line and smooths out the pulses, then makes an educated guess as to the state of the headlight line.

My bet is that Mark's code doesn't do the same thing. A while back, he tried doing some debounce logic on the sensing code, and it broke the knob-illumination for me. So he took it back out.

I don't know how the code is handled, and I don't know if the empeg's dimmer-sense logic is in the kernel or if it's in the player. So I don't know if Mark can benefit from looking at how the empeg guys handle it. But I think that their implementation is the most robust as far as I can tell.

In the meantime, does anyone know of a simple circuit (possibly involving a capacitor) that can be soldered into the headlight-sense wire and will take care of the pulse modulation problem Lopan is having? It would need to be able to do this without screwing up the pulse on the "car" side of the connection because his dash lights would still need to function normally.

The display-dimmer debounce I did for Tony had bugs.

But there is 1/3 sec debounce logic on the buttonLED dimming logic already. You could try increasing that to a full second (in the source code) for better debouncing..

Cheers

We also forgot to ask Lopan if his existing dimmer (for the player screen) works properly...

Well, it did, but it was sketchy... basically sometimes it'd wait a few seconds before dimming, sometimes immediate, sometimes not at all, It didn't bother me til that whole blinking light ordeal happened! But thats OK, I don't mind not having the dimmer, when it comes to trying to hack source code I revert to primitive man... scratching myself and grunting so I'll stay away from that