The Future of Lighting | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Lighting

arstechnica.com

74 pointsnecubi14 comments

A group of colleagues and I planning an attempt to elucidate some of the luciferin synthesis genes in our spare time. Much of the pathway is unknown at present, and there would be interesting applications given a complete understanding.

In the unlikely event that we manage to work out the entire system (which I doubt we can in our little free time), I can see us switching to a full time project trying to clone it into house plants or trees or something. I've got decent experience with agrobacterium and callus culture protocols, and we could use computational / systems biologic modelling to cut down the gene expression and regulation search space given some initial in vivo data.

Do you think we would be able to get private funding if we made headway? I haven't looked into that much, let alone biotech startups, but I would be very interested in starting one. It's unfortunately pretty costly work...

The Founders Fund might be willing to fund you:

http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/founders-fu...

OLEDs and LEDs however still don't have a CRI that matches that of a nice incandescent light.

There is much to-do in the theater world about when LED light sources will be able to take over the venerable HPL and other tungsten sources, and the ability to accurately light color is a major stopping point.

That's always been my issue, too. Even CFLs aren't great, and those don't dim.

I started following another technology a few years back called ESL (Electron Stimulated Luminescence) which is basically a TV turned into a light bulb. The company finally started shipping stuff earlier this year and I got my hands on 2 of them.

The light quality is really nice, and they dim quite well (although not as low as I'd like). It only puts out ~30 lumens/Watt. That makes their 19W bulb around 600 lumens and can reasonably replace 50-60W incandescent. Check out http://www.vu1corporation.com/ as far as I know they're the only company making ESL. I am not sure if their tech has the ability to scale up in terms of power or efficiency. It's a tiny company compared to the scale of those working on LED/OLED.

A good written article about all the facets of the lighting industry including some cost analysis. Two things I found missing. One is the LEP (Light Emitting Plasma), which is a also a very promising lighting technology, but not often covered in the media. Another point I think crucial for LED is the possible control capability compared to fluorescent technology. With smart detection and bi or tri-level light output settings for LED light solutions at the current 100lm/W show savings at e.g parking is up to 60% alone.

It's quite interesting why nobody's talking about making the light bulbs properly. For example the world's oldest still burning lightbulb in Livermore [1], which represents the technology when the bulbs were made to last.

Here in north the energy efficiency is bit different than in south. The heat the lights generate warm up the house and you cannot calculate the waste as you would in the warmer parts of the continent.

[1] http://www.centennialbulb.org/

Reading the bulb's wikipedia article, sounds like it is not really the bulb's technology that's responsible -- it is very low power (4 watts!), and has a dedicated steady power source. (I previously lived in an apartment with erratic power, and incandescent bulbs only lasted a couple weeks until I got the landlord to fix it.)

If you asked engineers today to come up with a long lasting 4 watt bulb, they'd probably do just fine.

The site reminded me from a TV documentary which stated that there was a light bulb cartel which enforced the manufacturers to build bulbs that lasted only about 1000-2000 hours to get more sales. I'd like to link to the video, but I saw it from finnish national television.

Edit: Oh yes it was linked on that site. http://www.catalanfilmsdb.cat/en/productions/documentary-tel...

According to the linked web site, the bulb started at 60 watts and, instead of burning out, has dimmed over time to 4 watts.

I have some LED bulbs by Qnuru, Philips, and GE, and I like them all. Good light quality, bright enough for my needs.

I did get them as review units, though, and retail they would be around $100 each. But in a couple years they should be quite inexpensive.

Not sure if it is just me, but I feel LED lamps emit inferior quality of light for reading. Hurts my eyes.

I use a solar charged LED lamp that has about 16 small LEDs in it. It's perfect for reading. The light is a warm white and bright.

There are different kinds of lamps with different light colours. I think you can go anywhere from yellow to white.

Cheap LEDs do this. They lack a warm spectrum. They also give a lot of noise on your electricity net.

But there are expensive LEDs emitting warm light. Perfect for reading. They emit a much wider spectrum of light.

I think in the aquarium world there are a lot of innovations when it comes to the light spectrum of LEDs. Especially in salt water aquariums.

For some reason I've always preferred cold light, even when reading.

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