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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

Is there one saying “All electronic devices are smoke machines, some can compute too”?

Similarly, diesel engines come with a reserve fuel supply that you can accidentally use once. (diesel engines will happily run on engine oil when warm)

This happened to me once in a Peugeot 306 2L turbo diesel.

Over filled it and kinda had to do one 1600m trip.

Fortunately it was manual so I was able to stall it fairly swiftly in third gear with my foot on the break.

Didn't seem to have any impact on the engine as far as normal operating and how it sounded. I didn't do any internal inspection.

The one I've heard is "Every machine is a smoke machine, if you operate it wrongly enough."

"All diodes are light-emitting if you try hard enough"

"All diodes are light-emitting at least once"

Hahaha yea

I've seen that in electronics lab a few times. The "temporarily light emitting diode"

I have a Temporarily light-emitting harddrive cable. Really old 40 MB hdd connected to an old computer with a cheap power supply that most likely couldn't handle the slightly lower than standard power in a friends house.

All diodes are also light SENSING is you try hard enough.

You don't have to try hard. Just use it as a photodiode and it magically works. However, if it's inside a plastic case that blocks light, it doesn't.

Due to some law about entropy, efficient processes are necessarily reversible. That's why electric motors - some of the most efficient machines ever invented - are also generators.

> However, if it's inside a plastic case that blocks light, it doesn't.

You want an ordinary diode to allow current to flow easily when it senses light? Simple: shine a powerful laser at the plastic-encased diode and it will melt the plastic and liquify the metal, fusing it together and allowing current to flow again. See? You just needed to try harder.

Or if the hammer don't work, the sledgehammer is over there.

All diodes are photodiodes, one has to be esp careful of glass encapsulated diodes. I have had that bite me before.

Especially true for LEDs, tried that in the lab once with a flood light, got a few μA out of the LED shortened with the multimeter. Did that with 8th graders, we did other experiments mainly with pv, LEDs and bipolar transistors as well.

The logical question came up more than once: “can we use photovoltaic cells as a light?“. Pretty sure that‘ll work, too, but didn’t try because stuff was expensive then and we didn’t have any broken parts of cells at the time. They probably learned a few things on that day.

Steve Mould of Youtube fame did this:

Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WGKz2sUa0w

I did try to do that in 8th grade, it worked for a bit but it was quite dim and uneven.

Ah, the light emitting resistor. The moment when you realize why it's called Ohm's Law.

"Inside every amplifier is an oscillator trying to get out."

"All electronics are hand-warmers if miscalibrated correctly enough."

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