The kicker is, this isn’t even necessary. It’s not LED lights that are the issue, it’s poorly-implemented dimming of LED lights.
In some cases (home lighting dimming), you can either buy a dimmable LED light or buy a dimmer made for LEDs.
But sometimes, it’s just built in to the device, and there’s nothing you can do about it. All it technically takes is a really simple circuit that adds capacitance to the line.
If you have a cheap strip of LEDs dimmed by a cheap PWM controller, you might even be able to just take the positive and wrap it through and around a ring magnet multiple times. I’m not sure that would work, but I’ve seen it done before for noise filtering, which this is, effectively.
What that does is averages out the highs and lows, significantly reducing flicker. There are some devices out there that do the (small amount) of work that is required not to flicker. It’s just… …dimming by flicker is really easy, and if a manufacturer can save a few cents at the cost of quality, a lot of them will.
The kicker is, this isn’t even necessary. It’s not LED lights that are the issue, it’s poorly-implemented dimming of LED lights.
In some cases (home lighting dimming), you can either buy a dimmable LED light or buy a dimmer made for LEDs.
But sometimes, it’s just built in to the device, and there’s nothing you can do about it. All it technically takes is a really simple circuit that adds capacitance to the line.
If you have a cheap strip of LEDs dimmed by a cheap PWM controller, you might even be able to just take the positive and wrap it through and around a ring magnet multiple times. I’m not sure that would work, but I’ve seen it done before for noise filtering, which this is, effectively.
What that does is averages out the highs and lows, significantly reducing flicker. There are some devices out there that do the (small amount) of work that is required not to flicker. It’s just… …dimming by flicker is really easy, and if a manufacturer can save a few cents at the cost of quality, a lot of them will.
You are describing an inductor not a capacitor. They can be basic low pass filters but I don’t think they will work in this case.
I wasn’t sure that, specifically, would work. But, the thing with the capacitor does work.
Looks like an inductor does work, but has to be fairly large, so isn’t worth it, particularly with cheap capacitor solutions available.
A variable resistor would do a perfect job and still be very low cost. Some high quality LED lights do this, but it is rare.
Neat! I’ll have to read up on those.