Super-bright 5mm IR LED – 940nm

Adafruit 387 - Super-bright 5mm IR LED - 940nm

Infrared LEDs are used for remote controls (they’re the little LED in the part you point at your TV) and ‘night-vision’ cameras, and these little blue guys are high-powered ones! They are 940nm wavelength, which is what nearly all devices listen to. They’re 20-degree beamwidth, and work great for any kind of remote control application.

Adafruit used one of these to make a camera control footswitch/intervalometer. These are the same LEDs used in their super TV-B-Gone kit. You can drive them continuously (for ‘night vision’ illumination) with 100mA, and for IR remote application, they can take up to 1 Amp pulses (!).

If you want to make a sender/receiver pair, you’ll want to get an IR remote receiver sensor as well.

Adafruit has a tutorial that covers everything you’ll need to know about IR remote control sensing as well as how to ‘clone’ a remote control in both Arduino & CircuitPython

Technical Details

• 5mm LED
• 940nm wavelength (most common)
• 20 degree beam width
• 100 mA continuous, 1000 mA pulse
• Approx 1.6V forward voltage (check datasheet for range)