Reducing LED brightness with the Procyon

My glasses with my Procyon seem to produce very bright light which is uncomfortable for me even at very low brightness setting (especially at night with no ambient lighting). The problem seems to be the individual LEDs are seen as point sources.

What I did was to place two pieces of black insulation tape about 1cm square over the inner sections so that the light is spread out and now comes from the two reflective strips instead. This works very well, I can now set the brightness at a level higher and still be comfortable.

This seems to have an additional benefit though. I reasoned that the brightness of the LEDs is controlled by timer/counters in the microcontroller set to PWM mode, which means there are a finite number of steps between off and fully on. When the brightnees control is set low this means there are fewer steps available from off to on. You can actually see this, if you look at the LEDs when the setting is high they seem to smoothly transition from on to off, at lower settings they seem to 'step' - in fact at very low settings sometimes some of the LEDs don't even come on. So being able to increase the setting actually seems to produce smoother LED changes.

The ideal solution would have been to open the Procyon and change the resistors that set the LED current, but the above seems to do a similar thing.

Mark.

Hi Mark,

You are using the glasses with eye's closed?

Cheers,
Craig

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CraigT

Hi Mark,

You are using the glasses with eye's closed?

Cheers,
Craig

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Of course. What actually happens for me is the LEDs have a high point source intensity and shine through the frosting of the plastic covering and are seen as blobs of bright light. By putting the insulation tape over that area the light is partially attenuated and the rest comes out by diffration from the strips at the top and bottom, it makes the sources seem larger (and therefore less intense). This is just my observations and I have quite sensistive eyes and this solution works for me.

Mark

Wow! I never cease to be amazed at the range of individual experience.

Thanks for the extra detail.

Cheers,
Craig

Mark , If you project the output of the glasses onto a white card at about the distance of your eyelid you'll see that the LED projected light pattern is a large diffuse patch, and almost indistinguishably different with the clear frosted diffuser on or off. Your black tape must be acting as a neutral density filter but I doubt it could be doing much more than that.

Mark S.

Perky,

remember you can also change the maximum brightness level (for eg, from 255 to 128 or 64) of each segment of your session through the Editor, and when you upload the modified session you will have greater control of brightness output when using the brightness dial on the Procyon console.

Better still, I use a thickness (~1/8" to 1/4") of white, translucent rubber-foam, as found in some packaging materials, shaped & taped on the inside of each ganzframe lens; it provides a pleasant, evenly diffused light over the whole surface of each lens.