Right-angle LEDs

The miniaturisation of components does cause the odd bit of trouble at Elektor Electronics as well. While developing last June’s Electrosmog Tester our lab suffered a few unpleasant setbacks. Read along…
For the Electrosmog Tester featured in the June 2005 issue of this year we looked for LEDs that radiated light towards the side instead of upwards, which is usually the case. Normally this is not an issue. With a standard leaded LED you can easily bend the legs so that the LED can point in any desired direction. However, with this project we wanted to keep things small and cheap. There are LED-arrays available that can be mounted on the side, but the price of those cannot be called attractive at all. That’s why we started looking in the area of SMD LEDs.