Make: Magazine, one of my favorite mags, and subsequently the website, has a really cool and informative movie on the history of LEDs. Did you know the first LED was actually a rock? Yeah, me neither. They also give a quick tutorial on how LED lights work and how to make a simple circuit. Go check it out and learn a thing or two thing Monday morning. At least you’ll know who Nick Holonyak, Jr. is the next time you Trivial Pursuit.
Mmmm.....tallscreen.
Is bigger always better? In this case, I would say yes. At least in terms of sheer awesomeness. What you’re looking at here is a future 33-story LED screen on a building in Dubai. The biggest LED bulbs we have are these 18W LED floodlight bulbs. You know, the place where the mega-rich go on vacation and they have nothing better to do than create their own islands in the shape of palm trees?
This screen is so large that you can see ads on it from 1.5 km away. How’s that for getting your message across to the masses. All I can think about is a massive game of Tetris, where each block is the size of a small office building.
Then when I’m done with that, how bout some Arkanoid and then finish the day off with a quick game of Raiden Fighters. Oh the possibilites…. How much do to you think it would cost for me to rent that for a few hours? Do you take Amex?
[Via Engadget]
Size comparison to a regular incandescent bulb
“It walks down stairs
Alone or in pairs
And makes a Slinkaty sound
A spring, a spring
A marvelous thing
Everyone knows it’s Slinky”
Which this is not. But it does have that feel with its funky looking heatsink. This monster is made in Korea and is one of the brightest screw-in replacement LED light bulbs I’ve ever seen. This is WAY brighter than the LR6 we mentioned in a previous post. The size is almost definitely for heat dissipation reasons. Which works wonders because for the brightness and light that this things produces, the bulb only gets slightly warm. Other lesser sized bulbs with a smaller heatsink and more compacted LEDs would definitely be too hot to hold, though not skin-scorching like an incandescent can be. The size IS quite…large…but it’s not as heavy as you would think considering it’s for heat-sinking purposes.
It’s interesting because many people think that if you buy an LED bulb - it must have a CREE chip to be the “brightest”. Absolutely untrue. The LEDs in here are “no-name”, but put into a package that can disperse heat extremely well, you can pump up the power and get more light. See the pictures below for an example of how it lights up a room. And this is a terrible placement for it too. I was lazy. :(.
22W Lighting up a room
Looking at the top of the bulb, you can see the array of LEDs used to give off this massive amount of light. The nice thing about using so many LEDs vs. say 10, is that you’re not driving each element so hard that it HAS to give off lots of heat in order to function without overheating. Touch the top translucent plastic cover, and you’ll see its cooler than the back of your LCD monitor that you’re using to view this picture. OVerall, a pretty good design. Unfortunately, this sample I got is not yet in full production yet, or I’d get a crate full of them. Have you seen brighter? Let us know in the comments!
P.S. I’m eventually going to make a video of this bulb too. And it won’t need to be connected to an AC outlet to work. I heart LEDs.
UPDATE 1/25/09: We don’t have that monster in yet, but we do have some nice high powered bulbs (with requisite hefty heatsinks here
Closeup of the monster
As long as there's money involved...
Its always hard to push innovation for the sake of innovation, if there’s no immediate need or immediate benefit from it. Its kind of like procrastinating from doing that term paper since it’s not due until the end of the year. The later you start on it, the less time you have though, to make it good. So along the same line of the X-Prize, the Department of Energy has sponsored the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L-Prize for short) to try to kick the asses of the industry to create something amazing while there’s still time before the “end of the semester”.
The contest is to see who can make a 10-watt replacement for the 60-watt incandescent bulb. The contest was introduced last May, and requires that the lights last 25,000 hours (at 4 hours a day, that’s 17 years!) That’s actually not too difficult, as our LED floodlight bulbs are almost at that 60W mark. The “deal-breaker” as far one of the guidelines go, is that the price should go down to $8 a bulb by the third year of production. Now that’s probably the biggest hurdle. Like any emerging technology, the earlier designs, before they become mainstream, are going to cost a considerable amount more. But then it becomes a Catch-22. We can produce the bulbs for a lot less once people start buying more, but we people won’t start buying more until we can produce them for less. Something here has to give for the wheels to start turning, and hopefully the straw that will break the camel’s back will the want for innovation, rather than the need because we have no choice.
The DOE says that if every household in the U.S. switched all their bulbs to LEDs, you could save enough energy in a year to power everything in Las Vegas for two full years. That’s a lot of incentive in terms of energy saved. If you look at any large-sized company, there is a ton of space that is used as their working environment, and to light up something like that, you must be able to see the cost benefits of switching to eneergy efficient lighting. Well, hopefully this prize can be handed out sooner than later, because time is slowly ticking away….
[Via NY Times and L Prize]
This website is crazy with it's new LED products for eyes and a mouth.
We were reviewed by The LED Museum. Yay! This is the second Eternaleds bulb review (since that first one a few months ago) that we’ve gotten so it’s good to see our name out there. LED Museum is run by a really nice guy by the name of Craig Johnson since 1999 and he’s done reviews on a ton of different LED-types of products from LED light bulbs to flashlights to nightlights and kids toys. I checked his site and he’s got thousands of reviews of various things that twinkle. The nice thing is he’s got pictures of the beam of the lights on a wall so you can see how the spread looks and how bright it is.
He’s got a bunch of tech specs of some of our more popular bulbs, and when I asked him how to read the graphs and results on his chart, he said
“His site is a little bit old school design-wise, but you could spend hours looking at all the different things he’s reviewed. Check out what he said for our HP-10 Globe, HP-3 Mini-Flood, and our new LumiStick.
Those crazy Germans.
Rather than using fossil fuels to create electricity and use the electricity to create light, the town of Dusseldorf has for many years, skipped that unneeded step and burned the gas directly in lamps to create light. I don’t know exactly how much light gas lamps can produce, but that’s probably a lot of extra carbon being pumped into the air.
The municipal power utility is trying out a new plan to replace all their gas lamps with LED lights. Of the 17,000 gas lamps in the city, about 10,000 will be replaced with LED spotlight bulbs.
So far only two dozen have been replaced as a test and people are already unhappy saying the light is rather cold (did you see the pun?). Ulrich Kuiper, who developed the lamps says that he will use warmer LED colors (there’s the pun again) for future lamps. My question would be “How all those Germans will be able to light their cigars at night when they forget their lighter?” But I guess eventually LEDs will be hot enough to do that too. Just kidding. LED’s don’t get that hot.
[Via The Economist]
What I’ve noticed lately is there’s a lack of information that can be found on the web about LEDs. Now there’s a ton of information online about LEDs in general, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to LED lights specifically and what to look for when wanting to purchase them, the information is very sparse, and if it even IS available, it’s usually in a very technical format where you practically need an engineering degree to decrypt what the figures mean.
Because of that, we’ve decided to create a guide of our own. It’s a guide that explains :
and most importantly,
If you like it, Digg it, facebook it, or please let us know in the comments below!!!
Those crazy Chinese are at it again with another version of the Great Wall, at least from my perspective. I guess they’re in it to win it when it comes to grand displays to impress the rest of the world. Maybe this time they’re actually getting it right. This version is made up of LED lights and dwarves anything I’ve seen lately. Probably not the biggest I’ve EVER seen, but then again, it also isn’t an installation that uses half a million watts just for the sound system. No, this wall is so “great” because it is billed as a zero-energy fixture.
The LED wall contains solar panels that harvest the sun’s rays during the day, and uses that energy to display a video light show at night. How completely perfect. It’s like the true circle of life. In theory, you could build one of these in the middle of the desert, away from any and all civilization, and play large-than-life size movies off of it. Take that another step further and I would LOVE to play some old school Street Fighter II on a deserted island. Although GTA IV would definitely keep my attention for a little longer.
This is a one-off structure, so I don’t think they’re selling to the general public, but if you have to ask how much it would cost, you definitely can’t afford it. The new green buzzword of 2008 is “zero energy“. I’m already an adopter. I’ve had this solar-powered flashlight for years….
Back when I was a young’un and lived in the ‘burbs, there were times when I would be walking down the street or riding my bike alone at night. Sometimes as I was passing under one of those yellow-orange sodium streetlamps, they would, without any type of warning, suddenly turn off. Now having a wild imagination, I came up with two possible hypotheses for this occurrence. The first was that I was gifted with some magical power, or subconscious sixth sense, that interacts with the electrical field generated by the light, causing it to turn off. The other explanation was that a ghost or apparition was turning it off, as though sending me a sign that something bad (ala death and/or dismemberment) was going to happen. Generally, the latter idea would take hold and I would sprint the rest of the way back home.
With these new lights, I may not have to worry about that ever again. Not only is it solar powered and using LED lights, it also works on a motion sensor. This makes a lot of sense in theory, since there’s no point in lighting up a path where there is no one walking down. My favorite feature is how it sits at 30% brightness, until something walks by and trips the motion sensor. So if all the technology can converge the right way for this to eventually become a reality, we’re looking at these lights being “off the grid”! Preposterous! Imagine all the strange places you could just put these things. In a dark corner of an empty park. On the top of a cliff. In the middle of the desert. As a prank on top of a dome!
The design is very “trendy” which is always a benefit, but I’m wondering if this is still more of a proof-of-concept, than something that can be usefully implemented. From what I see, the LEDs being used are still the standard sized small LED’s that are used for keychain flashlights. Even used in an array, there isn’t enough power output to make the light as usable as it needs to be. The Eternaleds bulbs use more powerful LED circuits with energy output two orders of magnitude greater than the smaller bulbs. I worry that lights such as these will give LEDs the continuing reputation that they are not bright enough of not ready for consumer use. On the other hand, if the larger power LEDs are being used, then it’s also pulling more wattage, so there needs to be a brightness vs. power balance here.
Still, it’s great to see things like these even publicized (even if it’s very obvious it’s still in concept stage), and I feel like this is the first step towards the golden chalice of usable energy-efficient lighting fixtures. Right now though, more realistic goals need to be made for LED application, or the technology needed to fulfill those promises need to be put in the hands of responsible designers and architects.
Via [Gizmodo]
