Have we let the LED indicator light go too far? | Hacker News Reader

Have we let the LED indicator light go too far?

tedium.co

150 pointsimartin2k194 comments

Decades ago when I was training I was lucky enough to work under a very smart engineer who taught me that the ergonomics of indicators and how people interact with them was important (and thus ergonomics itself is also an important part of engineering). The issue arose after I raised the question about why the indicator lights on the racks of communications equipment that we were developing in our prototype laboratory did not light up when the power was applied.

He explained that in large plants such as a telephone exchange where there were hundreds of racks of essentially identical equipment that the only important indicator when all the equipment was working was a lit green bezel at the base of the rack immediately above the plinth to indicate that the rack had power. Thus a tech peering down a row of racks all of whose bezels were alight was informed immediately that all those racks were working. If a bezel was not lit then power to that rack had failed.

Indicators on individual items of equipment in the racks remained off unless a fault developed within the unit upon which a red indicator would light up. Maintenance and faultfinding was much quicker if the presence of a light indicated a fault rather than no light at all. If the tech peered down a row of racks and saw a red light he knew exactly where the fault was located.

This went hand in hand with what's known as the fuse indicate which is a led or globe in series with a resistor and wired across a fuse. Only when the fuse failed would the fault light appear (because of its simplicity such indicators are highly reliable).

Simply, using too many indicators is confusing. Unfortunately, these days, the baubles, bangles and beads brigade of designers who use leds for just about everything has never understood this. Similarly that green indicators should be used to indicate power is present and red to indicate fault. Unfortunately, no one bothers with these conventions anymore.

The Christmas tree panels in submarines and in just-in-time manufacturing plants are similarly designed—strategically located/placed lights on the panels only light up to indicate trouble (such as water breaching a watertight compartment, etc.).

I've never understood why such an important subject as human ergonomics isn't mandatory in university engineering degrees.

Airbus is known for their "dark cockpit" concept which is similar. Essentially, the presence of indicator lights or icons on MFDs should indicate to pilots that some action needs to be taken. Ideally, the action needed is the same one done by pressing the button that has lit up. This should make it easier for pilots to identify what needs attention, especially when something abnormal happens.

A similar strategy they've taken, which the computing industry could learn from, is a central fault management system which prioritizes any faults or alarms that occur during flight and only minimally alerts pilots (e.g. single warning light) if they do not require immediate attention. Instead of distracting pilots with minor alarms, minor faults are displayed for review after landing, when they are actionable by reporting the problems to maintenance. If an emergency does occur in flight, having all fault indications displayed in one place by severity hopefully makes it faster/easier for pilots to understand the problem.

Same with commands with no output in nominal execution - output only happens in case of error

Which is kind of a dark pattern for anything even a little time consuming.

A pilot can tell just by looking out the window/flying the plane as to whether the plane is moving. Software however can hang up for all sorts of reasons and never complete execution. You might be waiting on a network timeout for an hour because some didn't code that piece properly, or some random hardware error causes a stall.

Reasonable visibility into the real-time operations of the program is useful for the same reasons package tracking numbers are useful.

One extremely useful debugging "superpower" is just to sample a process when its hung–the stack trace can often give you a good idea what it is doing, even if the UI doesn't.

I've recently learnt this trick too but am having a hard time manually diffing stack-traces. Do you know of some tool that can help me analyze samples of stack-traces?

On macOS I just use Activity Monitor's sampling tool, which gives me the hottest stack trace. Something similar probably exists for other platforms? If not, you can emulate it poorly by attaching a debugger and repeatedly interrupting execution and seeing if anything shows up many times–if your program is truly stuck, it will generally be easy to see why because it'll show up in all your traces.

"Analyze samples of stack traces" is what a profiler does. Can you feed such information into a profiler (such as pprof or perf-report)?

> A pilot can tell just by looking out the window

Not in IMC

Then by looking at the PFD

I first read that as "by looking at the PNF", which almost makes sense. If the first officers eyes are bulging out of his skull, you clearly have a problem... :-D

Hahaha, and if he's hanging from his seatbelts you're either pulling negative G's or flying upside down ;-)

One of the first things humans discovered about flight is that you can't trust your senses.

Yes, but you can trust your senses enough to tell you're in the air and not yet dead.

Software with no output doesn't give you even that.

This one's a little trickier to apply: if e.g. I'm executing a command to update some rows in a database, a successful execution can tell me how many rows were changed. If the number seems too high or too low, that's useful for setting off my own internal alarms that something might have been wrong with my query.

In well-designed old style cockpits, all indicators pointed upwards when their value was nominal. Same idea.

What cockpits are these? Analog dial cockpits have been standard since WW2 if not before, and consist of:

- Attitude indicator (no needle, horizontal when straight and level)

- Altitude indicator (vertical at 0 feet)

- Airspeed indicator (vertical at 0 knots)

- Turn and slip indicator (horizontal when straight and level)

- Directional Gyro (always vertical, numbers on rim rotate)

- Vertical Speed indicator (horizontal when neither climbing or descending)

I struggle to come up with a single instrument in which vertical is a desirable direction to indicate, during flight.

Oil pressure. Engine temperature. Pump operating speed.

All of the things which used to be the domain of the flight engineer but have since been phased out by automation.

None of those things have a fixed nominal value. They're not health indicators.

Oil temp and vacuum for me. Only 1950's, so not quite WW2 vintage. :P

If the fault can be resolved by pushing a button and the system knows which button, why not remove the button entirely?

If a human decision is needed before pushing the button then there may be some risk in making it too easy since the human will just push any lit up button.

I think one easy example to think about is a landing configuration alarm. This usually sounds when the altitude is below a certain altitude (must be landing) but the flaps are up (or something else is not according to the handbook landing instructions). Could also be landing gear up but I think that was a common enough problem that newer commercial aircraft tend to have a dedicated "gear not down" alarm just for that case.

It's a situation where there's a pretty clear action to be taken (extend flaps) but that change will meaningfully impact flight dynamics, will need application of elevators and changes to trim, etc. and so changing it without pilot input could be a real hazard.

I think a lot of more subtle situations fall into the same category of there being a pretty clear corrective action, but the pilot needs to have positive awareness of when that change occurs, and may decide to delay action or do something else.

We can pretty easily draw analogy to this kind of thing in computing. Database migrations are one I've run into - nice for them to be completely automated in routine situations, but because they can result in downtime or old versions not working in some cases it's a good idea to run migrations with an engineer "in the loop" for uptime critical software. If it's automated they click the button and do nothing, but having the button to click ensures that they're aware of the change and present in case of problems.

I think you touch on what might be an easier example to demonstrate with here:

"GEAR NOT DOWN"

So the plane has determined you are close to the ground, but the landing gear is not extended.

What is the proper course of action?

If you're trying to land on a runway or other normal surface (i.e., 99 cases out of a hundred type of thing) the appropriate action would be to extend the landing gear.

In that other case though, extending the landing gear in preparation for something like an emergency water landing is certain to take something which has a surprisingly good survival rate and turn it into a mass casualty event.

So we're left with the choice between "do the usual thing automatically, and rely on the pilot to remember to override it in the rare event of an emergency" or "alert the pilot and rely on them to evaluate whether it's the right thing for their current situation and conditions".

I would definitely argue for the latter. Especially in this specific example increasing cognitive load during exceptional situations to make the unexceptional more convenient is probably not what we want to do. The plane is not aware of the actual situation the plane is in. The pilot is.

> If a human decision is needed before pushing the button then there may be some risk in making it too easy since the human will just push any lit up button.

Pilots receive training before they fly a plane, these are not laypeople.

Ideally yes, but as we saw with the 737-MAX the training isn't always available or correct even in the aviation industry (and if they can't get it right then other industries have little hope).

I'd argue a better UX would be to light up two or more buttons making the potential decisions more clear. Might be even better to use a touchscreen so that more context can be provided.

There are situations where the system is 90% sure that something is correct but needs the pilot to confirm. For example, you start flying off your planned course. Should it correct automatically? Probably not, there might be a reason the pilot is doing this.

Fair enough, but unfortunately Airbus did not extend that concept to the fault 'system' in the A380. When a Trent 900 engine in Qantas flight 32 exploded and cut through the control lines the pilots were overwhelmed by the amount of error data to the extent that they had considerable difficulty in interpreting the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

In this emergency, it's clear the fault indicators (and the data they supplied) were not fit for purpose. If you get a chance it is worth watching the documentary where the cabin crew discuss the problem.

It seems to me that there were other problems too with insufficient redundancy built into the control of the aircraft's ailerons (insufficient resiliency in a critical system) but that's off-topic here.

Having now read many of the posts, I'd add that the best way to deploy indicators will depend on the application and the situation in which they're installed. My key point is that if the system isn't fully automatic—that's to say where humans are involved in the process—designers must always consider human ergonomics. Simply put: indicators should be so configured so as to optimise the 'coupling' between the equipment and human observers.

This not only goes for lit indicators, bulbs, LEDs etc, but also dials and gauges, etc. For example the color of the dial and the ballistics (damping/settling) in audio VU (level) meters is closely defined. Moreover, although the VU meter has been around for many decades, dispute still surrounds it in that many prefer the PPM (Peak Program Meter) as pioneered by the BBC. Even the color of the dial was changed to the traditional aircraft white on black. I point this out because engineering with human ergonomics at its center is often far from being either obvious or simple.

Another example is the analog multimeter versus a digital one. A digital readout meter will give you precision but an analog one with the correct ballistics (usually with critical damping) is much better for nulling or following a drift, trend or rate of change.

I am not sure I'd want this at my server room. Every modern device has some sort of power supply -- even 48V devices have "soft-on" switches. Those can, and will fail. A single green LED is essential to indicate this.

I can imagine a "smart rack" that would have a proprietary system to detect if a device is plugged in but has a faulty power supply.. but I cannot image this being practical outside of a huge server room with homogeneous devices, like a telephone exchange.

That reminds me of the original Unix philosophy: programs should succeed silently, issuing (error) messages only on failure. You had to add a --verbose flag to get it to tell you what it had done.

I'm not sure how it arose, but one observation is even in the beginning the Unix world was full of shell scripts. If every command that shell script ran was chatty, the average shell script would overwhelm you very quickly with noise.

I think that also stems from shell using the stdout as data transfer for both humans and machines at the same time, and people expect to be able to pipe the output into another process for further processing. Extra text intermittently added would make this far less repeatable and lots of extra lines to filter away before processing.

Sure, you've got stderr, but most terminals will print these in the same way so a user doesn't know what is output and what is error really.

Goes to show how bad such tools are for automation really.

Genuinely curious about the fuse indicate you mention. On one hand it seems very useful! On the other hand, wouldn't this: a) pass a small amount of current in what would otherwise be a 'fault' condition? a few mA or so to light the globe/led b) depend on the load you have? a resistive load would allow the few mA to pass, but what about a regular led lightbulb (with a driver inside)?

In older telco gear they used fuses that were basically a spring held down with fuse wire, that when blown, made contact with the fault circuit. They effectively where a fuse activated switch.

When doing the led across the fuse trick, you need to make sure that the few mA passed is not harmful.

The indicator in any fuse indicate system draws minuscule current compared with the normal running current of the device (one hundredth the normal operating current or less would not be uncommon). Essentially, if say the power supply capacitors short-circuit and they blow the fuse then the residual current through the indicator and its current limiting resistor is so low that no additional damage will result. Incidentally, the current limiting resistor and indicator are power rated for short circuit conditions (i.e.: I^2R rating of the indicator and its limiting resistor are such as to maintain the indicator working indefinitely).

extrapickles is correct, and he's right about spring-loaded fuses in old telco gear. Moreover, there are many other systems for indicating faults depending on the type of fault. The issue here is that they don't indicate a fault until one actually occurs—by default they're 'off' until a fault appears.

The problem with indicator lights is, that they're useless, until you actually need that info. If i turn my head just a bit, i can see a 48 port ethernet switch with 50+ blinking lights here in the office, and 99.9% of the time, they're all useless. But, if something doesn't work, one quick glance, can tell me if the switch is on (lights), if the data is sent through (random blinking), if the ethernet connection to my pc is up (one specific light), is it waiting for spanning tree to set up (light color), is there a loop (all lights on, or blinking synchronously), and also if the connection is slow during a calm time, I can see who's sending most traffic (frequency of blinking).

I literally never look at them when all is ok, but when it's not, i get the status info in literally a second.

Same with my home router with 8leds (especially the "internet" one), same with my PCs (on/off, hdd activity) etc.

My prefered solution would be just to keep those things away from the bedroom. Currently, in my bedroom, there is only one visible led (TV), and even that one is very very dim red.

Electrical tape for complete blackout, and little small black dot stickers for LEDs you want to dim instead of completely cover.

For the black dot/circle stickers, just search for "black dot" on Amazon. The 6mm / 1/4 inch ones tends to fit neatly over most LEDs.

The electrical tape is easy enough to remove and reattach or replace for the rare occasion I actually need to see an indicator light.

I thought I'd need to remove it more often when I "snapped" and put electrical tape on every device in my living room a while back, but I've yet to remove a single bit of it. I'm sure I'll have to now and again, but it's worth the hassle.

I sleep with a fan at night - when my fan from college finally died after a decade of use, I replaced it with a similar tower fan. It had a nice speed, timer function that went long enough for me to use the auto-shutoff as an alarm clock to avoid being jarred awake by an actual alarm. Oh, and it also had

FIVE, HUGE, BRIGHT BLUE LEDS WHICH WERE ON CONSTANTLY WHEN IT WAS RUNNING.

What idiot thought this was a good idea? Oh, and snipping them from the circuit also made sure the fan wouldn't work in high speed for some reason. So I had to solder a piece of wire from one end of the removed leds to the other.

My theory is that the prevalence of blue LEDs to this date is an after-effect of people who grew up back when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, and who came to see blue LEDs as a way of signalling higher value and who got used to wanting to put blue LEDs in everything for that reason long after the signalling effect was lost.

(it was first in the early 90's that bright blue LEDs became available, at least at reasonable price points)

I suspect there's a lot of truth in this.

This reminds me of going for an interview at Durham University in the early 80s. A professor in the physics department proudly showed me a prototype blue LED that they had developed. It was indeed quite a novelty at that time.

Ah, yes - a quick search confirms there was research in this area going on at the time: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/16/6/02...

Undoubtedly I agree with both of you. Unfortunately, since the introduction of blue LEDs little thought has been given to the way people react to them. From my experience, they seem to raise the most criticism of all colored indicators.

I have an air filter with the same similarly bright blue LEDs. But, it has a night mode which you specifically have to enable each time where those are turned off. So the people who designed this thought of this problem and still wanted to have the overly-bright LEDs with no function. I don't quite understand.

Ha, I used to have a shirt draped around the neck of the fan for this exact reason. Didn't work too well, some of the light still bled through

I find that most tapes are not blacking out everything I want, and often light can leak through the cases of cheap equipment. For those cases I usually use a combination of tape (of any kind) with pieces of tin foil underneath, which reliably blocks all the light. Of course make sure to not use it on any contacts, but that's usually not an issue for consumer grade hardware.

I ended up putting some tape inside my Hue bridge to block out multiple bright blue LEDs. The cheap tape I used not blocking it completely (even with two or three layers) ended up working out pretty well - they're now _just_ bright enough to see if you need to check the status, but even in a dark room they won't catch your eye unless you're looking directly at them.

This! I also use electrical tape for complete blackout, and paper tape for dimming.

On a side note, also black electrical tape for laptop camera covering :)

Sound like it might also be an option to take a pin and poke a tiny aperture into the electrical tape over the lights you do want to see, only dim down.

That'd probably work fine too, but anywhere where I care about appearance I need to cut the electrical tape while the dot stickers are available in just the right size for fractions of a penny per sticker, so I have what appears to be a lifetime supply of stickers anyway.

I did this for LEDs, and I also took the opportunity to cover up all the logos on my electronics/appliances. It's nice having my home now be entirely free of Samsung/Sonos/Apple/Dell/etc. logos.

Took several different colours and types of tape to get everything looking nice.

Would also be very easy to add a switch that turns the indicator lights on while pressed. At least any indicator lights I look at already require me to be at arm's length from the device to discern which light is which.

Note that this is not one of those things that sound simple but would complicate the design a lot. It's literally just adding a switch to one of the line supplying power to the lights. It can be done completely modularly -- probably even hacked into place after the fact.

Yes! My internet box has this and it's practical: one button turns on and off the status LEDs. They are off mostly, and on on boot or rare times I need to check the status.

> I literally never look at them when all is ok, but when it's not, i get the status info in literally a second.

I'd say this is an argument for simply not having them on until something goes wrong.

I'm fortunate enough that almost all LEDs in my living room are dimmed green, with the exceptions being my speaker set with a very bright blue (covered with a black tape, they're always on anyway), and my external monitor (dim white, not on when in standby).

Unfortunately, my Thinkpad has an annoying blue power indicator and I can't keep my mic turned off via a keyboard shortcut since that turns on another blue LED. Especially annoying when the night light turns on.

Nice username BTW!

My router has 4 ethernet ports, 3 of them have cables plugged in. One of the cables are broken. One of the computers on the other end lost it's power. I want a cheap router and i don't want to configure which ports that are supposed to be in use. How many error-leds do you expect to be flashing?

Same goes for usb keys.. they used to come with leds and then not anymore. Sometimes you'd like to know if the IO layer is blocked or if it's just slow pace.

The ones I pick up in the checkout line at Microcenter still have I/O indicators (on top of being phenomenally inexpensive). It's a shame that more don't anymore.

I wanted to make a usb ring with task is only to be a data / power line activity led you plug other stuff in

The interesting question is, could it work the other way? Light up ones that aren't on in red. Light up ones that haven't sent data recently in yellow. I'm not sure what is ideal but the question might be is it more important to indicate success/normal or failure/error?

Who uses the indicator lights? - people looking behind a computer or at switchgear. They aren't regular users, they understand how networks operate and what the green/yellow lights mean. They're typically debugging a problem, for which you want the truest indication of what's happening on the wire.

For regular users who just care about working internet, you can notify the user of connection failure where they look - the screen.

A button or setting that turned the LEDs on/off would probably be prudent.

My HP ZR2440w screens have this. But I don't need it there, because it isnt glaringly bright. Some other stuff I have could profit from it, but lacks that setting. Dark tape does wonders :-)

This is one of my main pet peeves with modern life. I've never seen it discussed before, and no one I've brought it up with seems to share my annoyance.

It's currently the middle of the day, and my microphone has a visibly bright blue LED that I can't disable without dismantling it or unplugging it.

When I turn my monitor off at night, it has a flashing white LED, presumably to assure me that it is in standby for when I wake back up and decide to turn my computer on again. A note for any readers: to disable this LED, you need to turn the monitor off by navigating through the menu and choosing 'monitor off', and not by hitting the power button itself.

My router and modem light up the other side of my apartment with red and blue flashing lights.

The solution seems to be to cover everything up with unsightly black tape. That will solve everything except for the microphone, which has its LED buried deep within its bowels somewhere.

I use black tape too. It is getting worse and worse. Now that we have USB-C cables with electronics in them they just cannot resist adding a LED light. But Why?

I especially hate getting a hotel room late at night and discovering that it is full of LEDs at odd places where you cannot just socks over them.

A simple solution and less obvious than tape is to paint over the LED (dob it) with nail varnish. Depending on the applied thickness, the LED can be blanked out completely or simply just attenuated to your desired amount. (The tiny brush that comes with the varnish is just ideal for the purpose.)

The nail varnish can be diluted with varnish remover or when necessary just removed by it. HOWEVER BE CAREFUL - TEST AN INCONSPICUOUS PART OF THE SURFACE OF YOUR APPLIANCE WITH BOTH THE VARNISH AND REMOVER AS BOTH CONTAIN ACETONE WHICH CAN SOFTEN, MARK OR DISSOLVE PLASTIC.

Incidentally, I keep a range of nail varnishes of various colors in the workshop, they're very useful for locking the position of coil slugs and potentiometers, and the varnish can be snap-broken without damage to the components (and nail varnish is usually easier to obtain than coil dope).

ANOTHER WARNING — BUY YOUR OWN (DON'T STEAL IT FROM YOUR BETTER HALF OR YOU'LL BE IN DEEP YOU-KNOW-WHAT (I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE)).

Back in the day, I'd use nail polish/varnish to color over the windows of EEPROMS that I didn't want to erase. And we used to use red polish on EEPROMS with classified/secret data on it for military contracts.

And also, back in the day, we'd sit in the lab and paint our nails with the red polish while we were waiting 30 minutes for the Data General Nova to compile our code.

I really do relate: I have put pieces of electric insulation black tape on all the LEDs everywhere I can't turn off!

Best devices have an option to turn lights off though, which makes me happy when I find it.

The only thing in my apartment that has power overnight or when I'm out are the fridge and the internet router. Everything else is turned off and physically disconnected from the power grid. No blinking LEDs, no coil whine from power supplies and my power bill is ridiculously low compared to my friends'.

Some manufacturers noticed this anti-LED trend, though. My work monitors have a nice feature where I can disable the power LED permanently even when it's on.

Don't the blinking clocks on the oven and microwave bother you? :)

I have my microwave and toaster oven plugged into a power bar that I only turn on when I need to use them. Also disassembled my microwave to disconnect the beeper.

I have an oven and a microwave without digital timer. The perks of buying cheaper appliances!

Likewise. Mine is years old and was expensive when I bought it. It uses a rotary timer which is much easier and quicker to use. As I've mentioned elsewhere in these posts, ergonomics is important, and in this instance the simplest is also the easiest to use.

Try https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=3M+Aluminum+tape&ia=shoppin... instead?

It's mainly Cheap D-Brand Chinese hardware like external harddrive enclosures that really take the biscuit IMO. For some reason these use ultrabright non-diffused blue LEDS that leave a big blue spot on the wall across the room even in moderate darkness :P They're still stuck in the early 2000's "Wow cool blue LED" era.

However, I usually end up fixing that with a bit of black electrical tape. Overal indicators don't bother me.

One of them (which was not even a D-brand but more like B-brand: StarTech), I covered once with a Post-It note because I couldn't find electrical type quickly (and the benefit was you could still see the light somewhat). A month or so later I took it off and found that the paper had gone all white from being blasted by the UV light in the blue LED :P Definitely don't want all that in my eyes. I really don't know why they do it.

>They're still stuck in the early 2000's "Wow cool blue LED" era.

I wish gaudy LEDs were relegated to the early 2000s... seems they're becoming more common in consumer hardware even in high end items. Just a few months ago I was struggling to find a computer case that wasn't slathered in horrible LEDs and finally settled on one that just had LEDs covering the fans, I just bought new fans (which its also hard to find fans that aren't covered in LEDs).

A lot of people like that "RGB life".

Remember when LaCie had this huge blue light/button on their drives? (thankfully you could turn it off)

Ooh yes those big extruded aluminium ones with the huge round button. I never had one of those :)

I have to admit I kinda enjoy my 'skyline' of flickering lights in my network 'cabinet'. Switches, modems (fibre and 4G backup), a unify router, my home automation raspberry. It really makes it feel like stuff is working away there.

But these are all red, orange and green. I have a special hate for those harsh blue LEDs. For some reason they really irritate me.

I still have one under my desk near my feet now. Big rather than just bright. But very blue.

The worst are wireless chargers on the bedside table. Too dim, and you can't tell they're charging in the daytime. Too bright, and they're obnoxious at night. And the lights are actually needed because the chargers are so finicky to position, so you can't just slap a piece of electrical tape over them, which is my usual solution to LEDs. I suppose manufacturers could have the brightness level adapt with an ambient light sensor, but then the price goes up. Ugh.

My personal least favorite LED ever, however, was a temporary apartment I lived in that put a wifi router with a blinking blue LED directly over the bed. WHY?!

Too dim, and you can't tell they're charging in the daytime. Too bright, and they're obnoxious at night.

I have a device designed for the bedroom that does a pretty good job with this problem.

When it's off, the light is on. When it's on, the light is off.

It sounds counterintuitive in an office environment, but since the device is meant to be kept next to the bed and used at night, turning off when in use makes perfect sense. Especially since if you want to turn it on in the dark, the light is illuminated and helps you find the thing.

What if someone disconnects it from the wall?

Because of its purpose, you would know immediately.

Blue LEDs are infuriating.

I remember the days when blue LEDs were too expensive to use in consumer products... Wish it was still like that.

I agree wireless chargers are super finicky, but don't most phone screens wake up when they start charging? I always used that as the indicator for when I had gotten it to the right spot.

My phone's LED blinks occasionally when it's charging and the screen is off. It's just the right brightness.

Unfortunately many newer phones don't have notification LEDs :(

True, but I really like my apple leather folio case...

There is some digital communication between Qi chargers and devices so they can stop charging at 100% battery. So everything's there for some kind of "night mode" communication to exist, whether the phone's clock or DND mode or ambient light sensor triggers it.

The first thing I usually do in a Hotel room is to unplug the TV.

What drives me really crazy is that lately there seems to be a trend to have smoke detectors with regularly blinking LEDs above the bed in Hotel rooms. I make sure I always have some stickers with me when I go to Hotels, but I find it really hard to understand how anyone could think this is a good idea or even acceptable...

> I make sure I always have some stickers with me when I go to Hotels

For extra fun, put a sticker over it that says "THIS IS NOT A CAMERA". Something like this:

https://twitter.com/JimStLeger/status/762008969153908736/pho...

For some reason hotels don't actually seem to optimize rooms for sleeping at all.

And the staff seem to re-plug them every day in many places, quite annoying.

First thing I do on a business trip is ask for extra towels and put the Do Not Disturb sign on. I don't take it off until I check out.

The staff re-plugging the TV makes sense since their checklist likely requires them to ensure that the equipment in the room is functioning correctly.

I suffer from migraines. And like many migraineurs, I am very sensitive to light even when I'm not having a migraine. Given that ~15% of humanity gets migraines, and many of them are (to some degree) in the same boat as me, I find this obsession with bright & blinking lights utterly appalling. It's negatively effecting millions of people, with hardly benefit.

Useless bright lights are everywhere. Often without any way to tone them down or turn them off. I don't mind getting funny looks for wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, but I don't want to wear sunglasses indoors ... and yet people keep slapping more and more LEDs on absolutely everything. I have little globs of Blu Tack all over my house, covering LEDs on the most ridiculous appliances.

Stop it. Just. Bloody. Stop. How hard can it be for a product designer to ask the question "does this LED convey useful information?", and just scrap the bloody thing if the answer is no?

I have a stereo that has had a bit of modeling clay on its power button since the day I bought it (in 2003) because in some really smart design choice, the power button lights up red to let you know it's off. When the stereo is on, the light turns off but the display screen lights up. So even turning the power off to get rid of the lights in the room merely just turns a different light on.

There is one single place that design choice makes sense, and that is the light switch in the kitchen, bathroom or hallway.

Check my post out about using nail varnish to cover up the LEDs.

But the design problem is much, much bigger than just gaudy LEDs. There are so many electronic appliances (and software UIs, etc.) around that have been designed by people without any skills whatsoever in design or without any understanding in user ergonomics. It's a serious problem even from a secondary perspective, as it so annoys people that they chuck equipment away before its use-by date which only adds to the mountains of e-waste.

I have several set-top boxes (PVRs) with software that is so dreadfully bad (not to mention full of serious software bugs) that I consider these appliances close to being unusable.

Bought a PC case last year which has a green power LED. It's infuriating how bright it is in the dark, and despite being placed below my desk I can still see it e.g. when playing a game in the dark. I wrote a message to the manufacturer and suggested that this is pretty annoying. They were quite dismissive and replied that it's "impossible to make it darker". I'm not an electrical engineer but I'm positive even I could accomplish that task with some additional resistors.

Edit: I should also add that the LED is part of the power button, so it's not so simple to just tape over it. If I want to play in the dark, I put a piece of paper / cardboard on top of the PC.

On my desktop PC, the plug to the power button + lights is actually split into its component parts, and each component is labelled. So I can connect to each pin on the motherboard header separately. This made it easy to yank the power and HDD activity lights, while keeping the power and reset buttons enabled.

My fractal design case actually uses a separate cable for each of them. It's great.

You can disconnect the LED cable from the motherboard.

My ASRock motherboard has a 'goodnight LED' setting - the power LED turns on for a couple of seconds when the computer first turns on, then turns off the rest of the time.

Otherwise you can just disconnect it from the motherboard, it should be wired separately.

It's a shame that these LEDs aren't exposed to the OS so you can control them in software; so the firmware turns them on by default to indicate power, but then once the operating system loads it is able to turn them off if necessary.

Search for "black dot" on Amazon. You can find stickers in various sizes that are good for dimming LEDs. Unless it's a really awkward shape you should be able to find one that'll cover the LED while keeping the button usable.

My trick for really annoying ones is Kapton tape. They amber color really cuts down on the passed blue light but you can still see them. If one layer isn't enough you can add a second layer.

Multiple layers of electrical tape on most of my devices to bring the lights down to a reasonable level. A brand name battery charger and an off-brand HDMI splitter are the worst things I own for intensely bright blue LEDs.

And why do my friends' Bluetooth speakers have both a power on light and a loud sequence of beeps when you turn them on or off? Not to mention the beep when you press a physical volume button on them.

Classic NEMA color coding is:

- Green - status OK.

- Yellow - status abnormal but does not require urgent attention.

- Red - you should be doing something about this. No red light should be on for long periods.

- Blue or white - on, no particular meaning.

This is still seen in industrial plants, often in the form of stacked cylindrical lights on a post on top of a machine. Anyone can look at the whole shop floor and see what needs attention.

LED color coding is

- Red - 1970s.

- Green - 1980s.

- Blue - 1990s.

- Color changing - 2000s.

Literal LCD display with touchscreen to display status - 2020s (see https://amplifi.com/)

Just buy aluminum foil tape (or use aluminum foil + regular tape) and cover them all.

Aluminum foil blocks all light and is thin and cheap.

You can also cover windows in places without effective light blocking devices like roller shutters.

LEDs are cheap. It would be awesome to replace them in many applications with a cheap, reliable indicator which doesn't emit light but to my knowledge something like this doesn't exist. Flip discs don't seem like they'd be reliable or cheap enough for a consumer product. What you'd want is almost something like a single pixel e-Ink dot. AFAIK, no one makes such a thing, and even if they did, it probably would cost 4-5x an LED.

a cheap, reliable indicator which doesn't emit light but to my knowledge something like this doesn't exist.

In the decades before LEDs, VFDs, and vacuum tube indicators existed, there were plenty of these. The ones I disassembled operated with magnets. When current was applied, the magnet held the indicator behind the viewing window. When the current went off, gravity pulled the notification into the viewing window.

The indicator was usually something like a solid yellow block of plastic, or yellow diagonal stripes with the word FAIL in the middle. They were super common, but I don't know if there's a specific word for them.

Non-backlit LCD is a possibility. If you need several indicators, you can combine them into one LCD.

The downside is they are hard to read, especially cheap ones and especially at weird angles.

I'm sure I own some product with a non-backlit LCD where you can push a button to have the backlight turn on, which times out after some time. Can't for the life of me remember what product that's in though.

Yeah, that's pretty common.

I have an Opus BT-C2000 battery charger that does exactly that. Pressing any button causes the backlight to come on for about 30 seconds.

Also a Garmin Forerunner FR220 running watch which has a dedicated button for this (with a light bulb icon). LCD is a good choice for it since it's used outdoors a lot and LED (or AMOLED) wouldn't be readable in direct sun.

Something like this already exists and is cheaper than red LEDs. At least it used to be cheaper.

IR LEDs.

Invisible to the naked eye. If you want to see the nifty status LEDs, simply hold your cellphone camera (which is IR sensitive) and look at the phone. Bonus you can take a pix of the lights and file it with a trouble ticket or whatever.

For a good laugh start up your cellphone camera and hold it in front of a IR (not RF) remote control and push a remote button, it'll light up in a big way on camera. Some TV remotes are practically IR flashlights as in light up the room, cheap ones not as bright.

Speaking of remotes, the OP incorrectly associates the LED with the invention of the remote control, but in fact the remote control predates LEDs and solid-state electronics entirely. The first remote control (I owned one!) was acoustic. It had ultrasonic chimes and buttons. Each button hammered a chime. There were circuits in the TV that were excited by the acoustic wave, which changed the channel and all that.

The Zenith "Space Command" ultrasonic remote control appeared on the market in 1956.

> It would be awesome to replace ...

Replace? You're thinking too hard! Just delete the lights! Delete all the buttons, too, except for one! Make the user enter morse code into the button for all operations without any indication whatsoever of internal device state except a nondescript failure 30 seconds later! User experience! Design!

I see you're familiar with the Apple design paradigm. Remove functionality and call it a feature.

Have you reserved your MacBook Wheel yet?

https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA

Something no one discusses is this is part of the death of brick and mortar retail.

In the 70s you'd go to a warehouse-superstore for electronics lit by incandescent bulbs or maybe old school buzzy flicker fluorescents and it was DARK as electricity cost money.

By the turn of the century its all palaces of consumerism bright lit with modern florescent bulbs.

Now a days the remaining electronics stores sometimes have bright as heck LED illumination.

The stores are more brightly lit than most homes; a device bright enough to stand out on a showroom floor as the bright one will be blinding in an average home.

As brick and mortar retail dies out, somewhat more sane levels of illumination will be acceptable in products. Even now, its already getting to the point that nobody cares about the stylish box if amazon is going to deliver it anyway.

Cheaper than buying a pack of single-use round stickers is using a sewing needle to make a tiny hole in a piece of electrical tape, and sticking that over the LED such that just a little light can come through the hole. It's enough to see the state of the indicator when you care, and also enough to keep it from annoying when you don't.

I use this to reduce the volume on piezo buzzers. A needle hole punched in cellophane tape over the port. With sewing needles, the tip has a taper so you can tune the volume by gradually opening the hole.

I just use electric tape and tape them all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same here. So easy to pull off and re-tape if I ever need to actually see if a light is on.

If I "just" want to dim a led instead of completely cover it, you can by packs of hundreds of small circular stickers in various colours for next to nothing. I bought 400 black ones several years ago, and most leds are dimmed enough to be a lot less annoying by one of them. Some take 2-3 - especially super-bright blue leds.

But usually either one of the dots or electrical tape is what I want.

I use little bits of gaff tape instead of electrical tape, for less sticky residue. If I still want an indicator, I poke a hole in the tape with a pin. Stickers are probably a better idea though!

Of course I've done this to myself too. "This network switch would look cooler with purple LEDs". oops.

FWIW electrical tape transmits infrared. Not a concern here, but it can be if you're expecting it to trigger an optointerrupter!

SOoo much electrical tape around my house covering LEDs and displays. Products are designed in isolation - where one crazy-bright blue LED might be tolerable (in the bright testing environment). But get a house full of devices, and that's a lot of LEDs.

The one that annoys me the most is my thinkpad. Apple made the slow, gentle "heartbeat" indicator when your laptop was asleep. It was a unique, delightful touch... for a while. Then everyone copied it (making it far less unique and delightful) - except they made the blinking faster, and the light red?!

Then Apple realised it was annoying and useless, and got rid of it... but everyone else kept them.

Thankfully there is electrical tape.

I hate both solutions. Many ThinkPads are okish with just a faint red led. But some also have a pulsing heartbeat blue light on the side when they're sleeping. How is that useful?

On the other hand with Macs now you can't tell what it's doing sometimes. Doesn't turn on, but the haptic feedback works on the touchpad? Is it just waking up from the disk? Is it hanging? Is the battery below minimum? Who knows...

The small red led on x1 carbon is my favourite.

Apple’s sleep indicator is more like breathing than a heartbeat - it is a 5 second cycle time on my old MacBook. Not many people have a 12bpm heart rate!

I use a couple of sheets of pre-cut blackout dot stickers in various sizes. More expensive than just using the duct tape, but the cleaner look is nice.

I have a small RGB to YPbPr adapter that I use for my old TV which had a alarmingly bright high intensity blue LED on it for seemingly no reason (it's just a few op amps and resistors in an enclosure). I opened it up and removed the offending light source and have been happier since. Honestly the amount of Power on/standby lights in my house is staggering

Agreed that there’s a market for home electronics that doesn’t try to sell on looking coolest in a store, but are reliable and work well in real life. No beeps, no unnecessary LEDs or LCDs, no fancy branded™ features. Just simple, basic, sturdy design that looks right in a home.

You could probably sell commodity hardware with high margin if you sold it with this promise and story.

Start reading magazines about gardening, retirement, group travel, birds, and other topics that skew 40+. Plenty of ads for such things there.

I get an inkling that this is very different from what I was trying to suggest, but maybe not. Is there some way to read more about these products without subscribing to some magazines I don’t care about?

> that there’s a market for home electronics that doesn’t try to sell on looking coolest in a store

These probably don't sell because when you go into a store the first thing you see is the one lit up like a Christmas tree.

Fucking smartphones and cars that need a musical jingle when they turn on and off, which you can't disable.

The display on our old cable box was green, and I had no trouble reading the time from across the room; whereas the replacement has a blue clock and I really struggle to read the numbers (the look-to-the-side-of-the-thing-you-want-to-see trick kind of works).

I always assumed bedside clocks were red due to it being least detrimental to your night vision

Your eyes can't focus the blue light. That's one of the reasons blue LED displays are so irritating. A low-intensity LED segment or dot panel is the best for a clock, but because they require a driver module and calibration to not look terrible, they cost a lot (relatively speaking).

A calibrated amber 5x7 matrix is, to me, an unsurpassed technology in digital display.

I put power strips with switches on most electronic stuff to make sure they are switched completely off when I don't need them. Gets rid of the annoying lights as well.

I especially like those with foot switches on a separate cord. The power strip on all the power adapters can remain hidden, but you can still easily switch everything on and off.

Oh god, I hate these foot-switched power cords. I still remember my second job, when in the middle of some work I accidentally stepped on the foot switch. Hearing the distinctive "click", I froze. At that moment, I felt like a character in a war movie, who just stepped on a land mine. Instinctively, I pulled a knife from my pocket, carefully slid it under my shoe, held the button down with it, asked a co-worker to fetch me my bag, and duct-taped the switch along with the knife.

The switch stayed that way ever since, until eventually we had to move to a larger office.

One of the reasons I bought a FRITZ!Box was that I can control all the LEDs. Lets me change the brightness or completely turn them off. I wish more devices had a feature like this.

My wireless access point (a tp-link eap245) has a single LED, and that can be turned off in the webinterface. I wish every device had such an option.

My tp-link actually has a button next to the LEDs that turns them all on or off. If I want to know whether it's my router that's broken or if the DSL line is down, I press the button and look at the indicator for DSL. The same-brand powerline adapter has it in the webinterface, I find that less nice but it works as well.

My last ADSL router/modem from Vodafone (UK telecoms/broadband company - unsure who the OEM was) was amazing in this respect. You could configure it to have all the lights off by default, and it had an infrared proximity sensor built into the top - wave your hand to activate the blinkenlights.

LEDs on most networking equipment are software-controlled. I can disable them on my OpenWrt devices and even the Devolo stock firmware also included a feature to disable LEDs.

There is something about LEDs on metal parts that is very “sci-fi cool” to me.

To pick one category, status indicators on older Dell Latitudes and Macbook Pros.

These were small, pleasant, and very useful.

The “breathing“ pattern is also amazing. So simple, yet nice.

Sir, these lights are blinking out of sequence. What should we do? Shatner - "Get them to blink in sequence"

https://youtu.be/kG-0V-85H_0?t=101

Haha, that's classic.

Reminds me, Dell Workstations have multiple numbered LEDs on the front panel that pretty much describe an error in binary.

The indicator light for the macbook pro camera is an example of an led used correctly. Off when the camera is off and on to show that the camera is on.

And it stays on for a minimum of 3 seconds no matter how long the camera is on. So there's less worry about micro-activations either from malware or badly-made Hubs For Teamwork.

Masking tape it's going to be then. It's interesting how such design choices really highlight the lack of design that happens with most products, consumer, pro, or otherwise. My tv has a red led that is on when the tv is off. Clearly not a single second of actual thought was given to this design. I don't need a light to tell me the screen is off. Almost all appliances with a light are the same way. Designed completely without thought to their practical use and consequences. Now that we know about the negative effects of light, energy saving led bulbs look extremely unattractive. I'm definitely not going to fill my house with them just to save a few bucks and contribute a minuscule and irrelevant reduction in greenhouse gasses. Apple used to be egregious with their lighted Apple logo on the back of its laptops. Talk about unnecessary bothersome light. Sony and their PlayStation controllers with interminable bright blue light is another example. And then there's the thousands of other manufacturers who just copy designs without a single thought to how they might negatively affect the user. On the plus side. Sonos lets me turn off the light on their speakers and it's a very dim white light to begin with but a blessing indeed.

Yes yes and yes. I have a box of cheap self adhesive dots for the purpose. They're so cheap that the average blue light bleeds through them slightly, so anything I actually do want to have an indicator I use one for, everything else gets two.

I always assumed those Apple logos were just using the screen backlight rather than utilising an additional LED just for the logo.

Yeah they are. If you have sun shining directly on the back of the screen you can see the apple logo on the screen as the sunlight passes through the backlight.

Yes There is no reason to have an off light.

Don't get me started on the useless beeps and talking everything seems to do. It's amazing how many things beep for no fing reason.

Had a keyboard once, with three brightest high intensity leds ever seen directed at your face.

Got an icepick and stabbed it until it was no more. Highly satisfying.

Mildly related, in the chapter Blinkenlights, Michal Zalewski describes the led indicator technology, and how it can be used for passive reconnaissance of serial data: https://nostarch.com/download/silence_ch05.pdf

The power LED on the sub-base next to my TV bright I couldn't even watch TV as I was squinting. I put about five layers of masking tape over it to dim it enough that I could still see when it was powered, but it didn't light the whole damn room up.

The clock in my bedroom uses an orange display, which I figure is better than one emitting blue light when you're trying to sleep.

And speaking of blue light when you're trying to sleep: a CPAP machine with blue back lit control panel so bright that I drop a face washer over it to block it out. That one feels particularly ironic.

And then you have the cell/mobile phone devices that have done without this simple trick for notifications. Do I need to wake the screen to know I have a new message or a new emai? I wish I didn't.

I bought a fairly pricey, but sturdy pedestal fan to endure the hot Australian summer. I read a couple of reviews and they were fairly favourable, but in the end I missed the key flaw: it has a giant bright white LED indicator to show the fan speed. It does not have an option to hide the LED indicator and so I've had to cover it up with paper to avoid my room lighting up at night.

I know the message has been echoed by a few people in this thread, but how hard is it to allow these indicators to be disabled or simply not install them on the device?

Seems like at least one company solved this problem. I have Asus TUF monitor (I don't remember exact model, but they should be similar) and LED indicator is almost unnoticable at night, but enough to see if the monitor is on.

[0] https://www.pcomp3000.pl/images/produkty/Monitory_32/VG32VQ/... (I couldn't find higher resolution image, the indicator is on the bottom right)

I have put black masking tape over so many LEDs in my life. Often more than one layer. Once I can no longer see them lighting up the nearby environment when the lights are off, I am done.

I seriously hate LEDs on things. Please at least turn the LED off after a while, or have some mode to do it. My logitech speakers in my bedroom have a blue light on the volume knob, which is meant to sit on a desk or table. I had to put two layers of electrical tape on that one to block it out it was so bright. Without that it would light up an entire room. (Then again, I am somewhat light sensitive)

This is why I like my Ubiquity AP and my Sonoff wifi relays with Espurna firmware - I can programatically switch them off, on etc.

It would be nice if the root cause was solved. Until that happens I just put a bit of black electrical tape on annoying indicators. Especially on my notebook with OLED screen, which emits next to no light when in terminal/dark mode, the power indicator (white LED) was incredibly bright and quite distracting.

I've got a set of $30 wireless earbuds, the Soundpeat Trueaudio, which are surprisingly decent for its price, except for one fatal flaw. It has an indicator light that blinks when it's on. Which is fine when it's bright, but in a dark setting the blinking is so obnoxious it is pretty much unusable.

If you permit me an unsolicited suggestion, I've had success using a black permanent marker to dim overly bright LEDs to an acceptable level. For really bright ones, which are causing trouble when the area is otherwise dark, I've also had success covering them with black insulation tape. It leaves them bright enough to be clear but not so bright as to cause annoyance.

Nail polish should work quite well.

Leave the freaking indicator lights alone. Advocate that manufacturers let you turn them off if you like, but I loathe devices that don't have them. Especially when they direct you for some damn app when I could just glance at an indicator light the majority of time to figure out what I need to know.

I have 2 LaCie Little Big Disk firewire drives. They each have a 1/2 inch diameter blue LED for hard drive activity. Needless to say I have to turn them around to face the wall otherwise I would go blind and insane.

The power indicator on my rack mount server has a single blue LED that projects a 2 foot blue circle of light onto the wall about 2 feet away from it.

gosh, I found an old eyetoy usb cam, and the blue led is beyond distracting.

As someone who sleeps with the lights on I don't get what the fuss is about.

I don't have an issue with them, unless they are in my bedroom. I need absolute dark to sleep, so anything with an LED indicator in my room gets some black duct tape over it.

i had this one device that had such an obnoxiously bright blue led that it would almost light up the whole room, once the eyes got used to the dark. completely unnecessary.

Kylie Minogue - Your Disco Needs You

[0} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqtzMue6Izw

next: animated car turn signals

I don't know why these infuriate me so much, but this is the absolute worst. Maybe because it looks so obnoxious. It seems like it should not be legal.

Before animated turn signals, NA's red turn signals should be illegal. And even more so the utter insanity that is using the same light as turn and braking signal.

A turn signal should be amber and absolutely not confusable with a brake light you absolute monsters.

Alec, is that you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA

I wish. But I re-watched that video recently, he's just so righteously correct. That volt is such obvious nonsense it's infuriating.

I also have irrational thoughts on the matter. Few feelings:

    - looks toyish and immature

    - marketing trick to sell whatever as new and improved

    - actually badly designed, something is wrong in all animations I've seen, it doesn't convey a warning but attracts attention and the light output is probably less contrasting because instead of full on / full off cycles, you get length of 5%, 10%,... up to 100 then off. [0]

It will probably pass but in the mean time, enjoy the trigger.

[0] reminds me of this era of electronics who are more absorbing than helpful

I think it's mostly because the eye is drawn to motion/change, which hijacks your attention. When the turning light is blinking on-off, it only distracts you for a fraction of a second each time it blinks, while alerting you to the driver's intention.

The animated turning lights are in motion closer to 90% of the time, so it takes a second to tell you what blinking light tells you in 10 milliseconds, and uses far too much of your attention bandwidth compared to how much information it conveys.

I think they should be illegal. The light should alert you and let you focus attention elsewhere, not mesmerize you with useless fanciness.

yes that's about what I feel. The led animation was made I assume to indicate direction but the location of the light already gives you this.. and the blink is a better signal/noise. So the animated LED is both worse AND redundant information.

Likewise. I've decided to give it a few years, perhaps by then I'll have made peace with it. At this point though, I get that same odd feeling... how can these be legal?

I can't even pinpoint what it is that irritates me about them, but I'm assuming it's just them being a complete deviation from what has been the norm for so long fucking with me.

Or maybe because it takes really long until it reaches its full brightness / visibility, unlike a traditional turn signal?

They really break the principle of least surprise.

I nearly had an accident once because I was that distracted trying to figure out what the weird animation on a back of a car was suppose to represent.

Dark red nail polisher works like a charm to (semi)permanently turn bright blue LEDs into dim red ones.

I've been using black sharpies, they work well enough for most situations.

I was pleased with Vanatoo speakers that allow for dimming or shutoff of the LED lights.

Both my TV and my router have options in the menu to turn the indicator lights off.

Lithographer's tape switches the light to very dim, but visible red.

My asus router has a phyical button to turn the leds on/off.

I paint over them with either nail polish or model paint.

I frequently paint over LEDs with black nail polish

Exactly! (See my comment above.)

I always find it funny when I see a claim that blue LEDs were invented in the 1990s. My 1985 VW Golf used one for the high beam indicator.

My 1984 VW Rabbit had a high beam indicator that looked like a blue LED, but it was actually just a super-bright regular light bulb behind a blue piece of plastic.

You can tell old car dash indicators are not LED because they actually put off a lot of heat

My TV confuses me, where a solid red light, indicates the TV is off. But a blinking red light, indicates the TV is on. I’ve had this TV for years, and I still can’t remember how to understand the LED lights.

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