Anchorage, Alaska To Install 16,000 LED Streetlights
Another win for LED bulbs: Anchorage, Alaska plans to replace 16,000 streetlight fixtures—a quarter of all the streetlight fixtures in the city—with LEDs. The new streetlights will use 50% less energy than current fixtures, leading Anchorage to potential savings of $360,000 each year. The city has invested $2.2 million in the plan.
Since Anchorage has 85 days a year with less than 8 hours of sunlight, energy efficiency initiatives are critical to the city’s survival. With other programs currently in the works, they’re on the right track.
Big LED Breakthrough at Purdue University Could Change the World
Found this over on TreeHugger
Better, Cheaper LEDs
The incandescent lightbulb that wastes 90% of the electricity as heat is dying, we all know that. But a new breakthrough in solid state lighting might also kill compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) faster than some expected. Scientists at Purdue University have figured out how to manufacture LED solid-state lights on regular metal-coated silicon wafers (more details below). What this means is: much lower costs.10% Reduction in Total Electricity Use
And since about 1/3 of U.S. electricity is used to produce light, this is major. “If you replaced existing lighting with solid-state lighting, following some reasonable estimates for the penetration of that technology based on economics and other factors, it could reduce the amount of energy we consume for lighting by about one-third. That represents a 10 percent reduction of electricity consumption and a comparable reduction of related carbon emissions,” said Timothy D. Sands, professor of Materials Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering states at Purdue.
Old LEDs vs. New LEDs
What makes traditional LEDs so expensive is that the light-emitting layer of an LED light is a gallium nitride crystal and it needs to be treated in various ways with expensive materials.Dailytech:
In sapphire based LEDs, used for green or blue lighting, mirror-like reflectors are need to reflect and resend emitted light, increasing the efficiency. Typically, this layer is extremely expensive to produce, part of the reason the current generation of LED lighting costs so much, costing at least 20 times more than conventional incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. Also, the LEDs are built on sapphire crystals, which provide the color, but are extremely expensive.
But the new LEDs can be made using standard silicon wafers and already existing, less expensive, processes. This would make them competitive with incandescent and CFLs.
The new techniques yield a crystalline structure aligned to the crystalline silicon. This means that the LEDs are less prone to defects and will perform more efficiently [...] silicon dissipates heat more effectively than sapphires. This will reduce damage during operation and lead to longer lifetimes and more reliability..
We might soon have to get used to changing lightbulbs every other decade.
LEDs that are currently available convert electricity to light with an efficiency of 47 to 64%. It is predicted that LED produced with Purdue’s process would have an efficiency in the high-end of that range, compared to about 10% for incandescent.
What do you get with 3000 LED’s, some Cell Phones and some Nerds?
A BIGASS UFO THAT’S CONTROLLED VIA SMS. Yup, we shouted, what are you going to do about it?
Anyway, we found this interesting little tidbit on Engadget today.. looks like someone has gone ahead and made a SMS controlled 3000 LED UFO looking spaceship. Well, it’s hanging via some wires, but we don’t need to talk about that. It’s freaking controlled with SMS’s.
Here’s the picture and article. Head over to Engadget for a video too.
Hey France, we’ve got one more for your sophisticated UFO archive. Dreamed up by artist Peter Coffin and crafted in conjunction with London-based Cinimod Studio, this 7-meter structure was built from aluminum and covered with 3,000 shockingly bright programmable LEDs. Furthermore, there’s an on board 6kW generator to provide power, and the overall UFO can be remotely controlled via SMS. There are even assertions that this thing flew along the coast of Sopot, Poland on July 4th (and even a video to “prove it,” posted after the jump), but we all know how dubious such proclamations can be.
[Via Hack N Mod]
Separate your time with these LED Alarm Clock Blockers
Found these interesting LED Clocks over at technabob today.. pretty neat, but I agree with the authors perspective that these color schemes are a little garish. It’s be nice if they used a LED Controller to let the user change the colors of them.
Looking for something a little different to set on your bedside table? This new alarm clock tears apart the hours, minutes and seconds and places them on individual time-telling blocks.
Seiji’s LED block alarm clock are interconnected using ribbon cables with enough slack in them to let you stack them pretty much any way you like.
You can even arrange the blocks into a vertical configuration, instead of the more typical horizontal orientation.
While they do seem a little derivative of Jonas Damon’s Open Edition LED clock, they’re just different enough to stand on their own. That said, I still prefer the less garish single color segmented LEDs on Damon’s original versus the red, white and blue dot matrix displays on these ones.
For the time being, you’ll have to admire these from afar anyway, as they’re currently only available in Japan.
Configurable LED Tiles allow for tasteless design
According to gizmodo, these new LED Tiles allow for all sorts of tasteless design down the road, personally, i think they’re pretty rad, and would look nice in some clubs, or dj booths etc, not only for kitchen use or bathroom use, these do look pretty “industrial”. check them out..
The idea of LED illuminated tiles is a good one in theory, but I’m afraid it’ll end up like fiber optic lighting and Bluetooth headsets in that people with no taste will take it over, ruining it for the rest of us. The waterproof tiles snap together Lego style and have a repeating connectivity scheme, much like model train tracks, except these light up and illuminate your kitchen or bathroom. And the layouts aren’t static, they can be changed at a whim. I’m hoping that some people exercise restraint if these ever come to market.
Light up your walls with this fantastic LED painter!
Found this on engadget.. pretty cool stuff, I’d like to build one of these, someone donate me some money so I can make it happen :p. Click through to see a video of the washer.
While a spinning LED globe or an LED-adorned Roomba is all well and good for a few kicks, if you really want to turn your living room into a light show you may want to consider something like Brilldea’s LED Painter system, which can apparently be put to use in a whole host of different applications, including the LED windows pictured above. At the heart of the system is a 16 channel RGB LED controller, which lets you connect up to 48 independent LEDs, and gives you the ability to daisy chain multiple boards together if you really want to blow things out. As you can see in the video after the break, the effects possible are fairly impressive, even if they’re a bit lacking in the subtlety department. [Via MAKE:Blog]
