Would this work?? RE: blue leds

[jlee75]

I've gone blue LED crazy. swapped out all of my LEDs (or most) w/ blue ones. Even swapped my monitor power on LED to blue. So now i'm kinda bored, looking at my red USB optical mouse. it looks so yummy sitting there. just waiting for me to swap out the LED that's in there. would it still work? i'm just wondering if the photodiode on the mouse is for a specific wavelength. if so, then it's simple as swapping the photodiode and the LED out. wonder if anyone's tried this yet.

also i'm looking at my laptop. it looks quite tasty too. just waiting for me to open her up and take out her LEDs and put in blue ones. anyone done this yet? i'll post a pic of my monitor blue LED in a lil.

 

[amnesiac]

I've seen people do it with blue and white LEDs. It just needs light for the receptor to pick up movement. I think red was used because it's cheap.

Hey, I have an idea.. instead of that, make a luminescent plexiglass mousepad with blue LEDs. See if that works.

 

[jlee75]

hrm. well if it works w/ any LED then ok... off to work i go. actually i'll do it tomorrow

 

[PliotronX]

Just make sure you use an LED rated at >3,000mcd because the sensors are less sensitive to blue than red (diagram). I put a blue 6,000mcd LED and a green 10,000mcd LED into my Logitech Dual Optical and not only does it work, but it tracks a lot better.

 

[jlee75]

thanks for the info. maybe i should put my 10 candela red in there then. j/k i want a different color. thanks again.

 

[vetteguy]

Seek and ye shall find

 

[Mark R]

It does work, just not very well. The general result is that it works, but it becomes more picky over the type of surface, and whether the lens is clean.

Lucent who make a very popular 'optical mouse navigation sensor' recommend a specific model number of LED to use as the light source, and state that performance is heavily degraded by using a different colour - but interestingly, they hint that, if a customer wanted, they could do a special order of sensors optimised for a different colour (but I wouldn't bother calling them, unless you wanted 100k of them)

 

[jlee75]

oh that's no issue there. i get sample orders all the time. i shall go and check. that's what i figured though, that the photo sensor on the mouse was optimized for a specific wavelength. ok... time for more research.