Where can I buy bluish white LEDs? I'm making an iron man reactor and am looking for about 15 5mm LEDs. I tried looking at radioshack, but they only have one white 5mm LED available, and it is a dull bright white, not a Bluish White like some other popular LEDs out there have.
Does anyone know of a good place to get them? I'm not sure what to search, I'm just searching white 5mm LED and looking at reviews to see if its a white white LED or a white LED with a tiny blue tint.
Thanks!
Dip them in some blue ink?
What about a RGB led? You should be able to make just the right color then, even make it pulse between two if you want to simulate it changing load or something 
wow... this is stupid.
But after reading what you just said, a RGB LED can be changed to make almost any color, right? I was thinking it could only be used to make Red, Blue, or Green LED colors.
If a combination of colors is true, does anyone know of good places to purchase some of those?
What's your ability level? if you're not comfortable with hardware then I'd suggest a BlinkM or a BlinkM MaxM. This will give you what you need with a nice graphical interface to choose you colour sequence. All still arduino
Go to Mouser:
http://mx.mouser.com/Optoelectronics/LED-Indication/Standard-LED-Through-Hole/_/N-75pv5?P=1z0yt3x&Keyword=white+led&FS=True
Look at the color temperatures in the datasheets. Pick your LED.
Higher temperatures will be more blue:
sweet. thanks guys! Exactly what I needed. Going to buy using the blink to experiment with and mouser provides exactly what i need to get the others.
thanks!
does anyone know of good places to purchase some of those?
Maybe: I've bought from these folks a few times, and have found that they have some of the best prices in the US (almost as good as buying direct from China), with super service.
However, I'm not happy with the RGB LEDs I bought from them: the emitters are located close to the front of the plastic, and the colors don't mix well. You can still see the individual R, G, and B. They worked fine with some additional plastic in front of them to diffuse the light and mix the colors, but that wasn't what I needed for the project I was working on. Others have had the same problem with LEDs from other suppliers, so shop carefully.
Since I don't know how you plan to package the LEDs, I don't know whether it will overcome that problem with their RGBs. If you can put the right kind of diffuser in front of them, or need some other kinds of LEDs, I highly recommend checking out c-leds.
wow, youre right. 20 led's for 5.00, thats extremely good. i'm sure ill come into the issue of packaging the led's when I get to it, but hopefully that wont be an issue.
The place they're going into is modeled in 3dsmax and cast in resin and looks like this. http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/4867/overviewr.jpg
They go in a fiber glass plastic, you can see the indentions that were made.
I've never actually seen multi-die (RG, RGB, etc) LEDs where the colors mixed into a perfect homogeneous dot. Actually a lot of single-die diffused LEDs aren't even the same brightness or color throughout the whole case, especially blue and white types. It's better not to worry much about the actual LED, and plan to add some type of extra diffusion if it's important.
How about Blue ø 3mm Clear LED Extra Bright 5000~10000mcd - dipmicro electronics?
20 LEDs for $1.40! I bought some white LEDs from them. Haven't tried them yet but everything else I bought from them work fine. They're in Canada.
okay. I bought a Arduino Uno and bought about 20 RGB LED's just to be safe.
I'm only planning on using 10 RGB LED's and 3 UV LED's for the inside. Do you think I'll have enough connections on the UNO to make this happen?
Could you not use 14 white and 1 blue? Im sure with a good diffuser it'll look how you want.
I'm only planning on using 10 RGB LED's and 3 UV LED's for the inside. Do you think I'll have enough connections on the UNO to make this happen?
Let's see. 10 * 3 is (stops to take shoes off...) 30. 30 + 3 is 33. The UNO has 14 digital pins + 6 analog pins that can be used as digital pins. That's a total of (stops to count toes, too) 20 pins.
If 33 is less than 20 in your world, you'll have enough pins. Or, you'll need more hardware.
Sarcasm, haha thanks for keeping my day bright.
I knew there wouldn't be enough pins if each pin from the LED was assigned to a Arduino Pin, I was just wondering if you could combine multiple LEDs to only a few pins, since I would only need them to do the same exact thing as the other LEDs do. They don't have to alternate or pulse in circles. Iron man's chest doesn't do that
But yea, non electrical engineer, just a computer science major thats taken a few electrical classes. Sorry, if these questions are stupid.
ps: what do you mean by hardware. Could they be combined like I had wanted to do above? If not, I may just switch to exactly 10 Cool White LEDs, 20 pins exactly?
Thanks Paul 
Can you use white LEDs, and add a little blue tint to the resin to shift the color?
Not as "totally kewl" from an electronics geek point of view, but perhaps cheaper and faster.
Thanks Ran.
well halloween is next weekend so im thinking the cheap and fast route for now.
over the past 10 minutes, Ive decided to use cool white led's, and if its not blue enough, do what you said and tint the resin. good idea.
thanks. so ill have 10 leds, 20 pins total, but still wanted to add my 3 random UV leds, is there some way I can hook up those 6 pins from the 3 UV leds into two arduino pins?
One pin is the ground, the other connects to the arduino trough a resistor.
13 LEDs is fine - you have 14 Digital pins and you only need one per LED (+resistor as above). If you think about layout - you could probably do some pretty cool effects too.
This is probably too late as it looks like you ordered already, but for future reference:
I just bought some 5mm Red, Orange, and Yellow LEDs from http://www.superbrightleds.com for 18 cents each at 100-lot qty.
They have a lot of other colors also.
They are quite bright with just a couple of mA of current - going up to 15-20 mA can be blinding!
The 3000 mcd LEDs can also be found inexpensively at surplus places like here http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=15109+OP
15 cents at 100-lot qtys.
I have some of the 10,000mcd Ultrawhite - break out the shades! I only run them at 1.5mA and it is bright!
Robert
Robert
