Shedding light on device crowding: custom lighting assemblies save space in hard-drive designs

A PC manufacturer, in search of the best status lighting arrangement for its new hard drive, has custom designed a lighting assembly. To save valuable space near the front of the hard drive, a group of three display lights was separated from the light source. The source, three surface-mount LEDs attached to a circuit board, was placed behind the hard drive. To deliver the light to the front of the device, an assembly consisting of flexible fiber-optic strands with rigid polycarbonate light pipes at both ends was employed.