Illuminated pushbuttons - electronics question


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Posted by matt(v) on August 16, 1999 at 23:16:53:

I saw some of these down at my local electronics store the other day and I thought "hey those would be cool to put on my control panel for Player start buttons.

Pretty easy to do, or so I thought, just snip off the diodes from your hacked keyboard and run the wires up to the diode in the pushbutton. Only problem is that the light in the pushbutton is a 12v filiment bulb rather than a diode, since the diodes run off (Im guessing) 3.3volts this is only enough to make the pushbutton glow faintly. I have tried replacing the bulb with an LED but this is also too faint.
any thoughts?

my ideas so far are
1) Rip the resistor that regulates the LED's voltage off the keyboard (bringing the current up to 5v) and replacing the current 12v bulb with a 5v one.
but I'm not too happy about donig this, has anyone else tried it and succeded/failed?

2) use the current LED as a kind of switch. hook up a 12 volt battery to the bulb in the pushbutton and wire it through the LED, now that I wriet that I can see that would fry the LED straight away. useless

So has anyone done this? if so how? I guess you could use a transistoror or two but i don't know enough about electronics to make this work. Any ideas are welcome




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