how to determine what type of 5mm blue led

AvroArrow

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Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
290
Location
Vancouver, BC
I've got a newbie request. I've already seached the forums, but haven't found anything relevant. Here's the problem: I've got 2 burnt out 5mm blue LEDs in my Lian-Li PC-6085a PC case and it's out of warranty. I'm still waiting to hear back from the shop where I bought it from to see if they can order spares, but it doesn't look good. Anyway, I'm okay with a soldering iron, so I figure I could go to my local mom & pop electronics shop and pick up a couple 5mm blue LEDs & solder them to the existing wires. BUT, I don't know what kind of LEDs to buy (e.g. specific forward voltage, current, etc). One of the burnt out LEDs is 1 of 2 used to light up a pair of vertical plastic bar thingies and plugs into a little PCB. I have a cheapy Radio Shack pocket digital multimeter that I used to measure the voltage to the connector, and the one without the LED is measuring 5.04V DC, the other connector with a working LED plugged into it is measuring 3.275V DC.

Is this enough information to figure out what kind of LED I need? This cheapy multimeter doesn't measure current, so I don't have any current info.

The other burnt out one is connected to the Power LED pins on my motherboard. Anyone know what kind of LED I need for that? Any help for this LED newbie is appreciated.
 

rdshores

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Joined
May 3, 2004
Messages
400
Location
Vermont
I would go to this site and get the blue ones.
http://www.lsdiodes.com/5mm/
If it was me, I'd get enough to replace them all , plus a few spares. That way you have all the same specs in case of another failure. You might have to track down the reason they burnt out. Lian-Li calls them super bright, so maybe they are really being overdriven. Let us know how it turns out.
 

AvroArrow

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Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
290
Location
Vancouver, BC
Thanks for the suggestion. I went ahead and picked up 2 super blue & 1 super green no-name 5mm LEDs for $2.20 CDN and cut the old ones off & soldered new ones on and it works great (for now). The super blue even matches the working one. I tested 2 different m/b's and they both feed the LEDs at 5V, so I don't know if they were being over-driven or not. I asked because I guess I was reading too much into Luxeons so I was worried about different Vfs & currents and stuff, and when I got to the shop, they just had different color LEDs, no voltage or current markings or anything. And when I asked about LumiLEDs Luxeons, the guy just gave me a blank look, at both shops that I went to (they're like 4 shops apart).
 
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