Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for electronics and electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm an electronics beginner.
Does an IR LED turn on like how regular LEDs turn on or does it only turn on when you've assigned a specific code for it to transmit?
The reason why I ask:
I bought some IR LEDs (940NM). I'm just trying to get them to turn on and view them with my phone camera. Do I have to use an IR sensor or can i just apply some sort of voltage and it turns on?
What is the easiest way of doing this? I'm using an Arduino.
Here is a link of the LED i bought:
IR LED's themselves turn on the same way as other LED's. But there are also IR LED transmit and receive modules which contain additional circuitry to encode and decode data. Those LED's you linked to, however, appear to be simple LED's. They should just turn on. You can try a 5V supply with a 1k resistor in series. Electrically, LED's are directional. Current can only flow through them in one direction. The positive supply should be connected to the longer lead of the LED. But if in doubt, try it both ways just to be sure.
Note that a lot of cameras have IR filters specifically to block IR light from getting to the sensor, so the camera may not see it unless it is very bright. If 1k resistor does not show up, you can try a bit lower like 470 or even 330 Ohms. I probably would not go too much lower with a 5V supply for fear of damaging the LED. It may also be a good idea to try several different cameras if you can. Security cameras often do not have IR filters because they use IR light to provide something like night vision.
An IR LED is a "regular LED". It's a diode that emits light.
You hence use it like any other LED: You get a datasheet that says how much forward current they are typically used with (e.g. 10 mA), what the forward voltage is (e.g. 1.6 V), and then you put them in series with a series resistor to your voltage source. I'm not going to go into detail about series resistors here, because there's literally thousands of explanations and calculators for LED series resistors out there.
You might be confusing an IR LED with an actual IR transmitter integrated circuit, which contains an IR LED, but also other things like a digital packetizer, and a power supply.
But: if that's the case, we have no idea what IC you're talking about, so we couldn't answer that.
EDIT after you added a product page link:
This looks like LEDs. So, this is just a plain IR LED.
By the way, amazon's not the place to buy electronic components. You wouldn't buy car tires in a vegetable shop, either. Go for one of the large electronic distributors, like Arrow or Digikey. You'll notice that when you buy from professionals, components will come with datasheets that actually define what they do.
Of course the IR led is turning on like a regular LED. Just test it with a camera or a phone to see the IR
