harddrive, led, brightness, enclosure, tinkerI have an external hard drive enclosure with a blue LED to indicate power on. I believe it's a dual color LED because I can just barely see a red flash when there's activity on the drive. I re-opened the enclosure (after having installed the drive and seeing the brightness) and if I remember correctly there is a three-conductor cable going to the LED so I think they are driven separately instead of by polarity reversal.
The blue LED is so bright I don't need other room illumination (this is only a slight exaggeration).
Short of covering the light with duct tape (perhaps with a pinhole), how can I control the brightness of the blue LED? Ideally, the red LED would be usefully visible as a result.
I posted this here since it seems to be more about an electronic gadget than a computer peripheral.
Without going into too much detail, if you reduce the current through that side of the diode (green side instead of red side) it'll get dimmer. I have no idea what the circuit looks like inside, but in most cases it's possible to put a small (low-value) resistor in series with the green side of the LED and make it dimmer. this will take some experimentation, and you might want to try using a potentiometer (variable resistor) to figure out what value of resistor you need.
Other than that it might be pretty straightforward to cut it out and use an external green LED (they're super cheap) soldered in its place in the circuit that's displaced 1-2" from the red LED so its clear when each is on or off (you could do this to the red one as well. Essentially, cutting one side of the two-color LED off and replacing it with another LED 1-2" away.
Notes:
requires some rudimentary knowledge of circuits and soldering.
Low tech solution: could you cover it with something translucent and red to filter out most of the blue?
(I've been trying to think of readily available translucent red materials. I think some older-style 3-D glasses have a red lens; maybe multiple layers to get the blue level down low enough.)
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