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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

lincolnquirk.com

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Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#61

Post by traceroute66 »

> Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company

Such a thing already exists. Its called a lighting design company.

People need to admit that lighting (like cryptography) is hard, and that if you're serious about "doing it right" you need to bring in a suitably skilled professional.

Each house/apartment is different and every room within it is different, you'll never be able to magically buy good lighting out of the box to be installed on a plug and play basis.

So if you are already undergoing the expense of a full-refurb and are serious about getting the lighting right, then really you should throw a few coins in the direction of a lighting professional.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#62

Post by Jedd »

boffinism wrote: post #27

I wish they'd talked about running costs as well as the price of parts in the 'costs' section. It's the electricity bill that puts me off. Unless it can be... solar powered?

From the article:

"Full-spectrum LEDs seem to output about 75 lumens per watt, so if our panel is 20k lumens then we should expect our panel to draw 266 watts. This seems reasonable to me. If you leave it on 8 hours a day, you’re going to use 25 cents per day in electricity (at $.12 per kWh)."

Almost anything can be solar powered.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#63

Post by necovek »

leobg wrote: post #12

DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually. Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power. I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window. If…

Since the OP is quite courageous about claiming someone "inventing" this in 2017, I'd like to highlight your prior art:

> Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.

And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#64

Post by sterlind »

runeks wrote: post #59
unglaublich wrote: post #35

This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it. By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat bu…

Not only that, but it would also be impossible to see what’s on your computer screen as this isn’t designed to outshine the sun.

if such a thing were possible, would it be healthy to use a monitor with a 10K lux backlight? I can't decide if this would help or just fry your eyes.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#65

Post by callesgg »

I tried doing something like this last year, I purchased lots of 1000 lumen LED bulbs.

The light was blindingly bright to look at and it looks very strange in a room.

My takeaway was:

* that you need some type of diffuser.

* The light leak out of the apartment was crazy. My apartment looked completely insane from the street.

* The light warmth is very important. And proper sun coloured lamps don't exist or are crazy expensive.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#66

Post by Freak_NL »

It's a shame the article doesn't talk about the actual LED components; I could use some pointers.

I built my living room lighting myself using a Raspberry Pi, a PCA9685 PWM IC (on one of those convenient little boards), a couple of MOSFETs and resistors on a breadboard, wiring (obviously), and fifteen lighting armatures that each have LEDs arranged on a square of about 15 cm². The LEDs are all of the 5050 RGBWW type (red, green, blue, and warm white), where the warm white LEDs perform the bulk of normal lighting. These are all mounted on the ubiquitous 12 mm 12 V LED strips, and are glued to an aluminium backplane, in nine parallel strips of 15 cm (9 LED components each). Each armature unit is covered by an MDF frame with a diffuser plate with a high light transmission suitable for LEDs, and the frames snap on to the armature units with magnets (that works really well and looks really good).¹²

This works well for such an amateur setup, but the two main issues are attrition due to heat death (presumably), and a wish for a little more lumens output. So for the next generation of these I want to keep the same form factor, but I'm thinking of making custom (replaceable!) PCBs with RGB LEDs and separate warm whites LEDs on an aluminium-backed PCB (JLCPCB can manufacture this type); keeping the nine-parallel-strips layout, but foregoing the backplane to allow heat to dissipate in the space between ceiling drywall and the floor above.

What I'm stuck on is how to find out where to source the warm-white LED SMD components that are actually good and not just tolerable. That is, good light colour, high CRI, etc, and where to get them as a consumer. Does anyone know which communities on the Internet know this?

Still a bit of a learning curve there regarding working with SMDs and designing PCBs, but that's part of the fun.

1: Testing progress in 2017: https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/828319063097143297

2: Finished with their diffuser covers; three of the units are visible here (note that the ceiling beading trim is still missing — long since finished of course): https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/885499829052485632/photo/2

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#67

Post by leobg »

namibj wrote: post #57
leobg wrote: post #12

DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually. Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power. I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window. If…

Yuji does indeed make the good stuff, just really in a consumer-friendly form factor unless you count the low-power bulbs. For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.

Exactly. You’d probably need fewer of the warm colored strips, because at the time of day when you will want to use them you’ll also want less light anyway.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#68

Post by captainmuon »

exhilaration wrote: post #44
captainmuon wrote: post #30

One thing they are missing is collimation. You might want the light rays to be parallel, to simulate the far away sun and to get sharp shadows. I tried to come up with a solution to do this in a flat package, but optics is not my strong suit. Generally, you always have a trade-off here: If you want to get rid of the harsh point-like light sources, you have to add a diffuser, and then you get indirect light. But too d…

There's a comment below yours with a link to a video where a youtuber solves that problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30497038

Yeah but he uses a huge parabolic mirror, which he places in the next room. He mentions fresnel lenses, but they are expensive, have color fringes, and depending on the focal length the whole light will also not be very flat.

The holy grail would be something that has the size of a picture frame, and you can slap below the ceiling, to fake a roof window.

If you combine a good fresnel lens with some clever mechanics or a micro mirror array light source, I wonder if you could even make the angle move over the day? Using fresnel lenses, you could also split it up into multiple cells, to make cooling easier. But I guess in the end there is a reason why the commercial system costs $30.000 and takes more than a foot of thickness.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#69

Post by schiho »

Simulating Daylight isn't very easy, especially not with LED diods. https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/OptimalLED/ There was a lot of research in covering the daylight spectra by adding additional LED diods to get close to daylight. Coming from a filmset background, usually strong metal Halide lights are used only to simulate a daylight scene, for example the arri daylight 18, which is using a Metal Halide 18000 Watt bulb.Attached outside of windows. Furthermore light sources (except for lasers) drop intensity quadratically, meaning the size of your room is a big factor. Talking about LED's, even on shoot's like the "mandalorian" where the main light source is a LED-WALL, the light isn't enough so that additional Studio lighting is added.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#70

Post by branko_d »

callesgg wrote: post #65

I tried doing something like this last year, I purchased lots of 1000 lumen LED bulbs. The light was blindingly bright to look at and it looks very strange in a room. My takeaway was: * that you need some type of diffuser. * The light leak out of the apartment was crazy. My apartment looked completely insane from the street. * The light warmth is very important. And proper sun coloured lamps don't exist or are crazy…

I used "rails lights" (the kind they often use in boutiques) and pointed them up at the ceiling (rails are mounted on walls, not the ceiling). There is almost nowhere in the apartment where you can look directly at a light source. The result: bright but pleasantly diffused light.
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