stupid newbie LED question.....

OK I bought some 5mm UV LED's from the sandwich shoppe and a green 3mm LED from them. I wanted to mod my mag solitare into using one of these. according to the flashlight review site i can just trim the leads and make them fit.

my problem is I can make the leds work with a 3v (CR123) source but not a 1.5v source AA and AAA.
am I doing something wrong? I guess I must be

Hmmm,, maybe you bought the wrong kind of LED. These kinds of LED's are definately NOT my area of expertise though. My thoughts are wither get different LED's or look at maybe a Li-Ion cell for the solitaire at 3.6v. I forget what size they are though, i know 14500's are AA size.

Shane

so I don't have enough volts at 1.5 to drive them?

thats what im thinking, but im no expert so i might be wrong.

You could run an infrared LED on 1.5 volts, but not much else. If you want to get visible light from an LED in a Solitaire, then you will need either a boost circuit or else a battery with a higher voltage.

Hi, Seth.

I remembered doing one mod based on what flashlightreviews had in the 'mod' section.

Basically, one will have to enlarge the the reflector for the led to fit thru and you could put in a MN23 battery(12V, but the voltage will sag) and a spacer(with some resistor for not over driving, but I was too lazy to bother) to make the led work.

I did one with 3mm and one with 5mm, the 5mm is definitely much brighter, but 3mm did fit very nicely into the reflector and required minimum work.

Good luck! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif