• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • brianorca@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldCords
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    In AC, diodes work half the time, every 1/60 second. The “good” LEDs will have circuitry to fully rectify the AC into DC, drop the voltage properly, and smooth the peaks and valleys, so they will be continuously lit. So the cheap LED Christmas lights might have a slight flicker, and the good ones are steady. (Or get fancy with chasing colors, etc.)

    All of that happens inside each of the “bulb” enclosures, or sometimes in a box at one end, so it technically doesn’t matter which end they are getting electricity from, since the socket at the far end is still just connected in parallel to the plug at the near end. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to link them together.)

    It’s just a really bad dangerous idea to reverse them.




  • It would still work. But it is VERY dangerous. 1. The far end of the light string will now have exposed metal prongs that are energized at 120v, which can be fatal. 2. If the other end gets plugged into a socket, there is a 50% chance it will be a different circuit on a different phase, which can create a 240v direct short, across a wire that has no properly sized circuit breaker. 3. Using it to plug a generator into your house during a power outage can kill electrical workers trying to fix the outage if you fail to open your circuit breakers.



  • Two things: 1: there’s a high chance you do cross live and neutral, or even live and live on different phases. 2: using it to plug in a generator to power your house can kill electrical workers who are trying to restore a power outage. (If you fail to open your circuit breaker.)














  • Our eye perceives color as a mix of red, green, blue. The lowest color of the rainbow is red (hue 0 degrees on a color wheel) but our red cones have another sensitivity just above blue, so the rainbow shows as violet (hue 270 degrees) when both blue and red cones are triggered. But here, blue is triggered more than red. Then the rainbow extends into the ultraviolet which doesn’t trigger any of our receptors. But the color wheel still has another 90 degrees or so of hue where red gets stronger and blue is weaker. These are not pure spectral colors, because they must activate both red and blue cones at different frequencies, not just a single frequency like violet does.