I cannot remember if I first saw this here on HN but, here is a detailed video of an incredible artificial sunlight rig build. It's big but the results look, well, amazingly real, at least to the camera.
I tried making artificial sunlight at home
121–130 of 243 posts
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about wiring them in parallel with a voltage regular after.
Then you waste a ton of energy on the conversion and still have the same problem. You won't ever get two regulators at exactly the same voltage. One will always take most of the load. You get around this with load balancing resistors, but that comes with its own set of problems. The way you get around that is to chop up your load into multiple independent power domains. That way each segment is powered exclusively by…
I meant in parallel so both positive terminals are connected to the regular in one node
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#123Very 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…
It’s infuriating that you only have “accept all cookies” and no other options. Oh but I do absolutely love this concept. I’m curious if you’ve had lots of interest from these billionaires building bunkers, if that story is even true!
Not a bunker per say but I recently learned that in some states/cities you don’t pay property taxes on square footage below ground so you end up with people building more space below than above ground and Virtual Sun can make it feel like above ground space. Just visited a billionaire project last week where this was the case.
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#124Very 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…
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Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#125Very 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 you guys looking at fabbing your own LED dies?
The actual spectrum of commercial LEDs is all over the place when you start measuring it it with a spectrometer, even when they supposedly have a high CRI. Especially if you want some temperature that isn't 6500K.
It was so bad that when I was building a night light for my eink desktop I ended up using halogen bulbs which I could undervolt. The main issue was that I wanted to be able to shift the spectrum of the lights from natural sunlight at noon, down to candle light at night.
I did have big plans for doing a neural network to control a bunch of LEDs against a reference temperature, but having to build and calibrate a spectrometer and jig as part of a back prop algorithm was a bit beyond my interest, especially since for halogens I just needed a lookup table with temperatures to voltages that worked for all the bulbs from the lot I used.
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#126Very 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…
Was the skylight in the season 25 episode of Grand Designs [1] made by your company? [1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x97hx8g (from 39 mins in)
Yes! Good eye. They installed a pretty early version of our product - I think it took 4-5 years for the episode to finally come out
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not joking. Do these artificial sunlights help with the allergies? If yes and if it's not insanely costly I'd just try to get something like that for my bedroom during allergy seasons which most often coincides with no sun (winter, rain here). Even in those seasons when the sun comes out in its glory, the allergies (which mostly is my nose turning into an infinite source of salt water), which were driving me stark ra…
Hmm, never heard that before, I’ll have to research it more. Maybe the UV from sunlight is killing something you are allergic to. We don’t have UV for safety and energy efficiency reasons but you could try buying some strong UV lamps and see if that helps. Ideally you turn them on when you are out of the room so they don’t damage your eyes or cause cancer.
Oh, thanks. I will explore more on this.
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#128Very 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 you guys looking at fabbing your own LED dies? The actual spectrum of commercial LEDs is all over the place when you start measuring it it with a spectrometer, even when they supposedly have a high CRI. Especially if you want some temperature that isn't 6500K. It was so bad that when I was building a night light for my eink desktop I ended up using halogen bulbs which I could undervolt. The main issue was that I…
there are companies that can do custom phosphor formulations for you to target a specific output. The minimum order quantities don’t make it practical for DIY but not too bad for a small startup. Our approach is to mix a bunch of different LEDs together to get the color and spectrum we want. Check out telelumen.com for an example that uses 16 chips. These are designed for researchers
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#129Really cool. Did you consider using hexagonal lenses? It seems like they would tessellate, while being closer to being circular.
Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home
#130I cannot remember if I first saw this here on HN but, here is a detailed video of an incredible artificial sunlight rig build. It's big but the results look, well, amazingly real, at least to the camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
This is what immediately came to mind.