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!!"
Spottyfox斑狐狸
Zelda 
@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 😆
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🔸Light up the night@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