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Related: I have noted over the years that incandescents with dimmer switches basically never burn out, and those with normal switches tend to break during the first second of being switched on. That's led me to the following thought: would it be possible to build a bulb with a built-in fade-in, either via bandpass/lowpass filtering or some sort of fading mechanism?

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I promise you that bulbs on dimmer switches do burn out. I just bought a house and the kitchen light on a dimmer switch burned out within a week of my moving in. No idea about the age of the bulb, so it's not very good data, but... Sadly, it's apparently still a crapshoot whether any given LED bulb works without flicker on any given dimmer of unknown design; I have only found those with flicker so far.

I have heard that such devices already exist. They are a NTC cap that goes over the end of the bulb.

http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html#ss

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