Mx Rey (Fuck ICE) 💜 🏳️⚧️"So, solar panels and LEDs are basically the same--"
"what??"
"They're like speakers and microphones--"
"WHAT!!"
"what??"
"They're like speakers and microphones--"
"WHAT!!"
things engineers assume everyone knows, number 742937
(muting this thread cuz I'm out and about, enjoy the physics!)
Spottyfox斑狐狸@rey Wait, what?!
@spottyfox which part
@rey The solar panel - LED part, had no idea
@spottyfox so they're basically the same: semiconductor junctions that deal with photons. if you apply enough light to a LED, it'll produce a voltage. if you apply enough voltage to a solar panel, it'll emit light. neither do a good job of doing the wrong thing, but they do
Charlotte 
/Cinny 
@rey @spottyfox the light of typical solar panels is infrared too so you need an infrared camera to see it (i think phones also work?)
H3@charlotte @spottyfox @rey a solar panel lifehack i saw on a youtube channel (bigclivetv if i remember correctly) was applying power to a solar panel, then looking at it with your phone to see which parts of the panel have failed (not lighting up)
@h3 @spottyfox @rey i think it relies on phone camera lenses having poor IR filtering, which phones with better cameras may improve on, but iirc solar panels and the LEDs in remotes use the same semiconductor alloy (pure silicon)
@charlotte @spottyfox @rey yeah. u can also just aquire a cheap shitty webcam and scrape/smash the glass IR filter out of it
Emily Love 🏳️⚧️
Nick 'The Viking'I was wondering if it was a repeatable thing... reading the OP, I immediately thought "Well if you apply enough voltage most anything will emit light 😆
Zelda 
Antwan van Houdt
DianeSteven Mould has a video showing LEDs generating voltage from light and solar panels glowing from voltage. (with an asterisk, since they glow in infrared)
Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)
pixx@alienghic @zelda @rey @spottyfox
I'd argue that's not even necessarily 'bad LED', just 'bad for normal human LED usage'. I'm sure you could find a good use for it :3
Atomic FoxEhrm, since forever? It's just that the typical LED junction is very small, so it makes a bad photodetector. In fact any old glass-envelope diode can be used as a photosensor, but they're typically most sensitive in the infrared.
Also, as a rule, light-sensing diodes are reverse-biased, and a lot of LEDs have a very low threshold for breakdown under reverse voltage. I can recall killing a red one when I was a kid by applying 3V from two AAs backward across it, being careless with the little Radio Shack 101 Circuits Lab.
Wilfried KlaebeThere's devices that use one IR LED on the device and another one on the communication adapter, pointed at each other, to do two-way communication.
joe@zelda @rey @spottyfox
Shapolab has a demonstration
https://misskey.io/notes/a8qj96g25z6f0ac7
btw Albert Einstein got his Nobel price for his work on this photoelectric effect : D
Shapolab has a demonstration
https://misskey.io/notes/a8qj96g25z6f0ac7
btw Albert Einstein got his Nobel price for his work on this photoelectric effect : D
@Joe_von_Saporski @rey @spottyfox that's a very cool proof of concept/demo! thanks :OO
i knew about the microphone/speaker part, it just seemed crazy to me that it would work with LEDs as well heh
@zelda @rey @spottyfox
There was a hardware bug in the Raspberry 3 I think. Everytime someone took a photo with flash lights the rpi crashed. Turned out, one package wasn't so light sealed as thought : D
btw @shapoco also built a bigger reflector and used high power LEDs
1000millimeter@Joe_von_Saporski @zelda @rey @spottyfox @shapoco It was the package of a voltage regulator. However I thought it was an earlier raspberry but may have been 3.
Brian Campbell@rey this is also why if you take a picture of your raspberry pi with a flash you can cause it to crash.
And those aren't even semiconductor junctions that were made for dealing with photons
7leaguebootdisk𓅽@unlambda @rey silicon is transparent to infra-red, Bunnie uses of to validate chips. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-iris-inspection-of-silicon/
Canageek@rey @spottyfox I know someone that built a spectrometer with an LED, a multimeter, a diffraction grating, a light source and some Lego to hold everything in the right position
LP still can't spell Ainmhícon@rey @spottyfox Yeah! There was a really cool electronic christmas card project that did that (amongst other tricks) a couple years back: https://www.keacher.com/xmas24/tech_info.htm#light_harvest
Matty Zero, foxalicious enby@rey @spottyfox and, incidentally, if the panels on your roof are emitting visible light at night, you need to do an emergency shut off at the inverter and call someone qualified to do repairs
Mx Lottie
0x4d6165 (Julie or Mae)@rey refrigerators are sorta engines that run backwards
the Stripey Goodness
Dan FitzGerald
apophis
kessler herd immunity@rey they are????
@rey or like electric motors and generators
ǝʌɐp
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️Makes me wonder if there is such a thing a an LAD - Light Absorbing Diode
And apparently there is
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32199/light-absorbing-diodes-characteristics
S T E L L A R 
@rey yes!
פְּרִי
Fabio Tavano@rey isn’t it the same principle of a programmable tv remote?
Dråfølin the Derg 
@rey wait till you hear that generators are motors
Three plus or minus five
Thepi
clewHuh… more details about reversible plz?
@clew @thepi @rey
Similar setup. Two levels. A photon with f the right energy whacks an election and pushes it into the higher energy state, and we let it slide out and charge our battery or whatever.
There are some tricks (two types of semiconductor, one where top state is almost full, one where it’s almost empty) and various tricks to get the energy difference right.
Similar setup. Two levels. A photon with f the right energy whacks an election and pushes it into the higher energy state, and we let it slide out and charge our battery or whatever.
There are some tricks (two types of semiconductor, one where top state is almost full, one where it’s almost empty) and various tricks to get the energy difference right.
Wanja
Luca Hammer@rey This reminded me of the person, who used a laser pointer and a photovoltaic panel to transfer sound. Flashing lights warning. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdT2kJqA/
Irenes (many)@rey credit where it's due, Heinlein was an ass but his fiction correctly pointed this out, long before the effect was productionized. we don't know whether we'd have realized it, if he hadn't. (the effect turned out to be less efficient than he assumed, making it not suitable for many of those uses, but still)
Toasterson (Till Wegmüller)@rey So you can transmit power with them?