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I tried making artificial sunlight at home

victorpoughon.fr

201–210 of 243 posts

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#201

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…

You can get LEDs which mimic the spectrum of natural light more closely, but these are usually specialty products (often specifically branded as sun-like). Here's one example https://www.greesled.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ab24a411...

In comparison, the LEDs chosen by the OP have a fairly poor power distribution spectrum. At 4000K the color temperature is also too low to mimic daylight, which is at around 5500K. This is all well as an artistic choice but probably doesn't get you any benefits for seasonal affective disorder.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a fantastic spec sheet. Not talking about the specs, I have no idea how to read that, but it's very very well presented.

Thanks. This is our own custom PDF viewer. I made the page by generating images from a PDF and then overlaying transparent text so you can search and copy/paste. This allows us to make the PDF much more interactive (I.e. help topics, forms, etc) and allows us to create URL that link to specific pages or topics. You can actually save the page locally as a single file and open it locally and it still works, similar to a PDF. There is a script that bundles all the content into a single page as base64 data. As HtMl it loads a lot faster than a PDF and generally smaller. 10 years ago this would have been a major undertaking to create but with AI and rich libraries available today it was just a couple of days work.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#204

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…

Nitpick, but the image in "Innerscene Health Impacts" is very obviously AI generated, besides any personal opinions on GenAI it just looks bad. I suspect photographing the intern will yield something better.

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll see if we can improve that image.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#205
https://store.yujiintl.com/ has broad spectrum LEDs/lamps/fake skylights that may also appeal to others interested in the OP--just noticed Yuji was mentioned in OP. I'm not affiliated with Yuji but have ordered some of their products and been very happy with their performance.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#207

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…

This is simultaneously really cool technology, like a hyper-specialized analog light field display with health benefits, and yet there's also something dystopically unsettling about the sun being faked by a machine in a box. Please don't have your marketing department destroy the real sun. Doing so would break antitrust regulations.

Yes! We started out building light field displays and originally used digital displays (arrays of micro LCD screens) - the result was super awesome but had a long road to becoming becoming a commercially viable product so pivoted to analog use cases which are a lot more energy efficient meaning we could achieve a lot brighter output.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, thanks. I will explore more on this.

I just want to emphasize how important it is for you to not be in the room with it when it's on. It can seriously damage you. There are stories of them being used at parties cause they looked cool and 12 hours later everyone is in the hospital cause it feels like their eyes are melting in permanent lava, their exposed skin is severely burned, it sounds like a horrible experience. Safety precautions are essential beca…

Thank you for the detailed warning.

I actually decided to let go of this idea after OP’s warning and reading a bit about it. Because one problem will be that I will have to enter to switch off and on and even though it could be a short lived exposure I was scared. Though I’d read more on this what it could kill in the room. The thing is it might not help anyway. It is seasonal/situational and it happens in other places as well or outside if sun is not up. So whatever it is (general guess is pollen, dust, dust mite, sudden temperature changes?, general pollution etc) it is already in me or on me or everywhere around me. So I guess it might rather help more with an allergy test and if I am lucky I can find what I am allergic to.

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#209
post #206

From the first videos, I thought this as a one meter square, or larger. 500 W of luminosity in such a small package, as it turns out, seems close to a thermal limit, even with 90+% efficiency.

how does this compare with heat dissipated per square cm when you compare with desktop CPUs?

Re: I tried making artificial sunlight at home

#210

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.

10^4.5 = 31622.77

As an approximation, 10^0.5 = pi = 3, so $30k was what my mind immediately jumped to
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