Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Hidden Displays / Indicators in Products

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randyyork:
I've seen some products that manage to hide LED indicators or small displays within the product enclosure. When turned off, the LEDs completely disappear into the product. I believe in certain configurations these are also called dead front displays.

Couple of random examples:




I was curious if anyone has any insights into how these can be produced? Do any films / plastic materials exist that can help hide displays on dark enclosures?

I know Apple worked hard to explore microperforations for LED indicators in aluminum laptop enclosures.

Thanks very much!

ajb:
It's mostly a matter of creating the right layering of masking and translucent materials.  One of the biggest tricks is to avoid having any colored tint to the materials (different to the surrounding areas, I mean), and having the internals be dark or hidden behind a smokey layer, so that incident light doesn't reflect out of the indicator area, but the colored light from the LEDs can shine through.  You also want to avoid having diffusion in the top layer, as this can scatter incident light and betray the underlying opening.  It's easiest to accomplish when you can design it into a custom injection molding or set of printing steps on mass manufactured devices.  In low volumes, you'd probably want to talk to an overlay manufacturer about how best to create the mask layer, and if you have multiple indicators close together you'll need to design in some sort of partitioning to keep one from bleeding into the next.

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