What is the point? Why on earth would you put a blue LED under a black button? You might as well use a red button! If you want it to light up blue, you should use either a blue button with a white high-intensity LED (2000 mcd or more), or a white button with a blue LED (~1000 mcd should suffice).
For the record, the colored Happs buttons tend to be more opaque (especially the darker colors like red or blue) and I'm sure that the black ones are just about totally opaque. The white buttons are quite translucent, and require much less intense LEDs to shine thru.
Also, if you don't understand anything about filtering, you should know that you will have a much harder time trying to illuminate colored buttons with different colored LEDs. For example, if you try to light a red button with a blue LED, you won't see much, since red buttons look red because they filter out all other colors. Only red or white LEDs will show through. Remember, white light carries all the colors in the visible spectrum, so they will light up anything (as long as the button is translucent enough.) I've found that using LEDs that match the button color give a much more saturated illumination and much purer color, but white LEDs make the buttons much brighter.
Also, if you use all white LEDs for your buttons, you don't have to worry about mixing voltages, as different color LEDs use different volts. However, white LEDs cost a little more. If you decide to use colored LEDs, I suggest making a lighting board similar to Oscar's, with a different circuit for each color of LEDs, using different resistors to drop the voltage for each bank (depending on which colors you use, and how many of each color.) You'll have to figure out the resistor values by using Ohm's law. Easy huh?
Good luck.
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Topic: leds in black buttons? (Read 2786 times)
