Art Lighting – How to NOT do it.
Looks like a fiery upside-down tulip
So personally I love lights. And I love cool applications for lights such as the Iron Man costume, but for me part of the charm and wonderment stems from an almost magical sense that the light is coming from nowhere. This artsy ceiling light by Designer Christopher Moulder accomplishes this by making the entire shade part conductive. Pretty neat idea. It uses little 10W xenon bulbs, which combined, total almost 300 watts. Could probably be more efficient if LEDs were used but maybe the xenons are extremely bright. Either way, I’d love to see some more designs that use LEDs since they would not only look good, but taste good be good for the environment as well. I have a few projects in mind in the next few months utilizing the portable nature of LEDs, so we’ll see what I can come up with. Stay tuned.
[via Gizmodo]
ANYONE can sell LEDs!
Chinese manufacturer logo – surfing babies what?! – are you kidding me??
I just got an email in our inbox today. We get spammed about 5x a day from different manufacturers in China trying to get us to sell THEIR LED products. This one was particularly funny since it DID get my attention, but not in a good way, with their attached logo of a chinese baby “catching a wave”. (I can’t make this stuff up people)
The emails generally consist of a Dear sir/madam – followed by extremely broken English, with an attached pricelist asking us to consider them to be our manufacturer.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Dear Sir,
This is Vickey who come from Shenzhen *** ,LTD .I am kindly know you are in the market of LED lights.I would like to indroduce our comapny and products to you ,Hope to we could build business relatioship in 2009.”
I left the spelling errors in there on purpose. Do they REALLY expect us to buy their products, if the first sentence in their email is plagued with grammatical and spelling errors?
There are literally hundreds of new manufacturers in China trying to jump on the LED bandwagon, and make LED light bulbs. The question is what % of them are complete garbage?. We’ve taken the time to contact a number of manufacturers and tested their products thoroughly, before deciding on who to go with which is why we can offer a 2 year warranty and 30 day guarantee.
Once again, buyer beware – there’s a ton of new websites cropping up selling LED lights, at LOW prices. Their manufacturer can very well be the one who can’t even hire someone who speaks english, or uses surfing chinese babies in their logo…would you spend $40-$100 with them?
Anyone else seen some questionable websites? We’ll be happy to scope them out and give you the lowdown.
Recycling Garbage is Trendy!
What can you make for a buck?
Oh how I envy the hope and naivety of the young. Kids that have yet to experience the real world and think that they can save the world by turning garbage into art. In this case, it’s a required part of their curriculum, so it’s for a worthy cause, namely getting them a degree. This is a nice gallery of things that you can make for “a dollar” which you definitely can’t get an led light bulb for at the moment. It’s a good idea, but probably not something that I would spend money on. Though if it is in fact, one dollar, then I guess it would be worth it.
I would have enjoyed doing something like this back when I was in school, but my extent of recycling was turning a juice box into a bomb…It’s like the Zoolander concept brought to life….Mugatu’s Derelict.
Design for a Dollar Challenge [Via Fast Company]
Super-powered, super cool LEDs
Super cool 21W bulb with an insane heatsink
Sorry guys, for the lack of updates. We’ve been VERY busy looking for some new manufacturers and new products. LED light bulbs and the technology that powers them is changing so fast, I’d almost say that the ones you’ve seen online 1 year ago are already obsolete.
The biggest advance we’ve seen is with heatsinking technology. Since LED dies/chips only get marginally better, the only other thing that manufacturers can do is cluster more LED’s together, and drive them harder.
More power means more heat, so they’re forced to come up with some insane heatsink designs (they’re starting to look like computer CPU heatsinks). I wonder if any CPU heatsink manufacturers are making LEDs……
The guy you see on your left is a whopping 21W LED floodlight that is DIMMABLE and is meant to replace about a 100W incandescent flood. 80% savings and it lasts 10x longer…NICE. Price? Well, let’s see if we can get them over here and we promise you we’ll get the lowest price possible.
So stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated on our status in the hunt for better, brighter LED bulbs. What’s the most common bulb you’d like to replace in your home or store? Floodlights? Halogen or Globes? Leave a comment and let us know…
LEDs Are Always Bigger….In Dubai
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. 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 than, 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]
CFLs and Skin Cancer…..Seriously?
Burn Baby Burn!
It’s 6pm the night before the prom and you stare at yourself in the mirror. You realize that no matter how much makeup you put on, it’s apparent that your pasty white skin is the result of all those long days studying indoors so you could get into MIT, rather than hanging out on the beach like the rest of your friends. All the tanning salons are booked solid through the weekend for the last-minute party rush and those tanning sprays made you look like a carrot the last time you used it. What do you do?
Being a future MIT alum, you craftily Macgyver together a rig of CFLs and toast yourself for 10 hours underneath to make it to the ball in time to claim the crown of Prom King.
Now you already know that those long fluorescent tubes used in tanning beds share the same genealogy, but did you know that they also carry similar hazards?
A study by the Health Protection Agency in the U.K. showed that some compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which have a visible coil emitted ultraviolet (UV) radiation above the recognised safety limits. Basically it’s saying that those lights that giving you a tan. Now that would be a good thing if you needed it, but sitting in front of one for 8+ hours a day is definitely more than you should get.
About 20% of the CFL bulbs tested emitted UV-C radiation which is more harmful than the more common UV-A or UV-B, and and it’s the same kind that’s used in hospitals to kill germs, and can cause DNA damage, leading to skin cancer.
The highest levels of UV radiation, about an inch away from the bulbs, was the same as exposure in direct summer sunlight, the agency said.
Now this doesn’t apply to all bulbs, but the most common bulbs do have this problem. So stop sitting so close to the light, cuz that burning sensation you feel in your eyes may or may not be just simple eyestrain. Oh well, on the bright side, I guess it gives me a legitimate reason to take more breaks during work…
I think I’ll stick to LEDs for my office lighting needs…
[Via The Guardian Via The Health Protection Agency]
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Don’t Throw This Down Your Stairs….You Know You Want To…
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 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.
Closeup of the monster
Light on a Stick…The Video
So this is a quick and raw video of one of our new products that can be found on the website. It’s the Eternaleds Lumistick. It’s 4.5 watts of PURE POWER! But seriously, it’s actually pretty bright and small enough to put anywhere, like under a kitchen cabinet, or in a drawer. Which also means that I have a lot of ideas for some arts and crafts for it. Imagine taking two of these and attaching it to an AC battery back, adding a red tinted filter to it, then running around in a park. Can you say Instant Lightsaber? That is one of my ideas for a video in the next coming months. If you have any questions about it or if you’re interested in seeing any other Eternaleds bulbs in action, post in the comments. Enjoy!
Luke, I am your father.