My team is using a Limelight 2 and due to the recent “Limelights being ruled illegal” post and Q&A 106, we are going to be turning off our lights when not actively targeting. My team is telling me that there is a “warm-up” period for the lights but I can’t find anything in the Limelight documentation or Chief Delphi about a warm-up period and LEDs by definition are not supposed to have a warm-up period. Also, one of the new features of the Limelight 2+ is that there is no “warm-up” period but it provides no more detail than that. Does anyone have any additional information?
They’re pretty darn instant on/off from what I can tell.
2 Likes
It can take ~20 seconds after turning on the robot for the limelight LEDs to turn on, but once it’s on changing the LED state is instant.
1 Like
The “warm-up” period is the time period when you power on the robot and the lights flash.
You shouldn’t have a problem about this when aiming to shoot, as others said, the lights turning on and off after “warm-up” will be instant.
1 Like
LEDs don’t generate light as a result of being hot enough to radiate visible light, but on a voltage step directly kicking electrons into energy states that are a few electron volts above their base state (green is nominally 2.3eV). From this state they spontaneously drop back down, each emitting a photon. The time to essentially full intensity is way smaller than human perception, my guess is that it’s on the order of a microsecond.
2 Likes
Thanks for the info. That all lines up with what I thought. I finally got my team to test this today and there was no impact to the robot performance when we turned on the LEDs right before searching for the target.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.