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I tried making artificial sunlight at home

victorpoughon.fr

101–110 of 243 posts

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#101

Very cool. I’m the CEO of Innerscene ( https://innerscene.com ) and we make a commercial artificial skylight that uses some of these concepts. Actually the coelux ht25 model is almost identical to what you made but using smaller lenses and more LEDs - however the effect they were able to achieve still isn’t that great, the sun looks like a giant orb and once you get a few feet away you can make out a sun at all. We s…

Are there any high-resolution photos of these panels in real spaces? I can only find renders.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#102
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It’s powder coating that gives it a super clean look, great for sales demos but I’d suggest that anything not visible from the room side should be cost optimized

Yeah definitely, I’m more referring to the bending process, material selection, fastener types, etc. It seems like quite the art form

Oh, gotcha. we don’t do that in-house but lots of companies are available that specialize in this - probably one near you if search for sheet metal fabricators.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing is ‘contact us’ and going to be region-dependent. I would expect to pay ca $ 10^4.5 for a panel that produces the ‘virtual sun’ effect. Same goes for competitors (I know of Coelux but maybe there are others. Not sure how quality/price compares). But maybe GP will reply to you.

Yes, it’s region specific. In the USA sales generally go through a partner. But it is a fraction of the weight, depth, and cost of the large coelux units that run $40k plus install. We also realized there is a need for producing just the sky with great photo metrics and that is even thinner and less expensive. A lot of interesting reading can be found in our interactive spec sheet here: https://www.innerscene.com/pro…

Is your pricing also a fraction of coelux's, or just the dimensions? :o)

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#105

Very cool. I’m the CEO of Innerscene ( https://innerscene.com ) and we make a commercial artificial skylight that uses some of these concepts. Actually the coelux ht25 model is almost identical to what you made but using smaller lenses and more LEDs - however the effect they were able to achieve still isn’t that great, the sun looks like a giant orb and once you get a few feet away you can make out a sun at all. We s…

I'm very impressed that Innerscene provides LM-63 data for your artificial skylights. Is there any chance you'd be open to providing Spectral Similarity Index scores for your skylight? I think it would really differentiate your product and show how much your company cares about quality.

We provide full 1nm resolution SPDs in our download section so you can do any kind of calculations you want. Worth noting the SPDs change a lot depending on the color temperature of the light. In terms of similarity, trying to match sunlight exactly is not ideal because UV is bad for you and IR is a lot of water energy that can be produced in other ways more efficiently. For energy efficiency we focus on the spectrum that is most important for humans (versus plants, fish, etc). This is mostly the visible spectrum as align with our cones and the blue spectrum aligned with our ipRGCs. Most people don’t know about ipRGCs so we have a research page about this here: https://www.innerscene.com/research For the visible spectrum we target 90+ CRI for the full CCT range (3000-40,000k) but it goes as high as 98 and even R9 goes up to 9& as well. You might find this content about ipRGCs and melanopic light interesting

https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS...

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#106

For me, the problem with this setup (and with most high efficiency LED lights) is the lack of red wavelenghts. Real sunlight has a substantial amount of energy in the very red end of the visible spectrum (700 nm) and also of course quite a bit in the infrared. These lamps have two spectral peaks: a narrow peak in the blue range, around 450 nm, a broader peak in the green, centered around 580 nm. That greenish peak fa…

> These lamps have two spectral peaks: a narrow peak in the blue range, around 450 nm, a broader peak in the green, centered around 580 nm. That greenish peak falls off sharply, and has almost no energy in the red end

Check figure 1h in the datasheet of the LEDs author used https://otmm.lumileds.com/adaptivemedia/832eef99dd3139f98fa9...

The second peak is near 650nm and while it drops fairly quickly there is still decent amount of power at even 700nm. In short, they perform far better than your stereotypical crappy white LEDs.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#107

Very cool. I’m the CEO of Innerscene ( https://innerscene.com ) and we make a commercial artificial skylight that uses some of these concepts. Actually the coelux ht25 model is almost identical to what you made but using smaller lenses and more LEDs - however the effect they were able to achieve still isn’t that great, the sun looks like a giant orb and once you get a few feet away you can make out a sun at all. We s…

Hi, I couldn't figure it out on your site but on the picture where you have your hand under the virtual sun[1], do you feel the warmth of the "sun" on your hand as you'd feel it with the real sun? [1] - https://www.innerscene.com/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic...

No, there is no IR to speak of, however a lot of people tell us they feel warmer when they stand under it - just a psychological effect but interesting to observe

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#108
post #70

I'd be interested in seeing the optical spectrograph of the LEDs. If you want to simulate sunlight you want a full-spectrum LED like a Samsung LM301 series LED which are popular in grow lights. Not all LEDs are created equal, and even the LEDs in many "grow" lights only show two sharp peaks at red and blue wavelengths. A full-spectrum LED will output colors across the visible spectrum of light. You can't tell by look…

The LED datasheet has Typical normalized power vs. wavelength graph (figure 1h) https://otmm.lumileds.com/adaptivemedia/832eef99dd3139f98fa9...

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#109

I saw "artificial sunlight" and thought "oh wow I'd love to see the spectrogram of the lighting solution this person came up with". I was disappointed to merely see "CRI 95+". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH_owRxupC0 This is great video on the shortcomings of "CRI" - it explains in detail CRI, CRI extended, TLCI, TM-30, and SSI. Brightness and color temperature are only two small parts of lighting - more people sh…

Do you have any insight on how to take spectroscopy measurements at home on a <1k€ budget? And how to select an LED manufacturing supplier when CRI is often the only thing available on the datasheet?

The luxeon 2835 website that’s linked in the article has a data sheet for the LED source. Scroll down and you’ll see the spectra for various subtypes of that source.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#110
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely helps for me, but it's hard to place the lights without glare, since they can't be anywhere that's ever directly in your vision! I'm also a little worried it's going to burn the houseplant near it. But it was a big change; my Silicon Valley apartment has little overhead lighting, and I mostly use Hue lights which just don't get very bright, so it turned out I'd accidentally built a depression cave in…

The 1600 lumen bulbs are worth it - if they fit your fixtures. Still nowhere near as bright as a window on a cloudy day though.

Part of my problem is my place has a lot of windows and is on the ground floor. So those are both good things, but the combination means I have to keep the curtains closed to maintain any privacy. Lighter curtains or something might help.
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