Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable
liu.se
liu.se
- non replaceable batteries (flashlights)
- unreliable drivers that fail before the LED does, or kill the LED by heat or excessive voltage
Happy to see people working on new LED tech but the downstream effects of selling disposable stuff has to be much worse?
My parents have a ceiling fan that came with an LED light, which broke. It was barely under warranty for the LED part still and the manufacturer sent out a new light module, except they've changed the fan a little over the years and the new module doesn't fit on the old fan... they ended up having to send a whole new fan.
They don't care if bulbs are replaceable, since their lifetime is limited to build -> sell.
IMHO, pretty unnecessary, as once the PAR30 dimmable LED bulbs got good, I don't think many people would prefer incandescent. OTOH, I think they were pushing compact fluorescent, which I don't think ever got very good.
For new construction now, the LED fixtures can be mounted without a can, because they put out way less heat, and some of them are very thin, so they may not penetrate beyond the thickness of the ceiling, which is neat. But for retrofitting, putting a screw in bulb is nice and easy.
Everyone I know who complains about LED bulbs failing, you ask them and they admit to buying the cheapest ones they could find.
At that point, I decided to just buy the cheap ones because that was easier than dealing with the warranty process anyway.
It depends on the cost curve. When the technology has matured, the cheap ones might be good enough, too.
Eg approximately all tooth pastes are equally effective, so you might as well go with the cheapest one that agrees with your taste buds.
My issue with LED bulbs is that they don't fail per se, instead they get progressively less and less bright over time. It's a slow fade rather than a sudden explosion.
(I've gotten into the habit of writing the installation date of all new bulbs on the stem as I insert/install them. Just because I want to track how long they last.)
The home LED market is pretty fractured and there's not all that much brand loyalty. (At least at the lower level where companies churn out lowest cost LEDs. The companies that bet on brand loyalty tend to have somewhat better quality.)
For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries?? Is there any way to avoid this problem besides regulation?
Just don't buy those, if you don't like them?
> For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries??
That only works as a business if your customer comes back to you. The market for these dirt cheap devices is pretty fragmented. And people are unlikely to turn into repeat customers, if the previous gadget failed them miserably.
A collection of maybe 50 well chosen modules could handle at least part of pretty much everything, while allowing for upgrades as tech improves.
A microwave and a dishwasher and a dryer could all use the same controller and the same display module. A desk lamp and a flashlight could use the same LED and driver.
The current modular systems are educational or hobbyist oriented, or they try to do stuff that crosses high bandwidth links and needs lots of pins, but there's not reason we can't have standard LED drivers and other simple stuff like that.
The whole range of modules would probably be pretty cheap, it's just a matter of convincing everyone to use them, which I guess is why nobody does it.
The modules you speak of exist, they're ICs. Most electronics now are just ICs and traces on a board. The real challenge is the IC tool chain is very complex and very not open.
It would do no good to have open source modules that are just traces and then a bunch of closed source ICs. This is what Sparkfun, adafruit, etc. do. It's great for engineers and hobbiests but it doesn't get to the root of the value you propose.
The real value is in the ICs, those are the magic modules you speak of that need to be open source.
Getting that to happen is a whole thing. Like getting ExxonMobil to share their oil rig designs.
It is becoming more and more feasible to do things software-defined, with a generic microcontroller being the core IC. I would love to see some projects for DC/DC power converters for example around a microcontroller with open software. This is a bit tricky because it needs to be safe, but in theory doable. Also need to be EMC compatible, which will require a lot of testing. Generally going beyond hobbyist requires much better QA than what most current open source hardware projects are willing/capable to do. Environmental testing, EMC testing, regulatory compliance, etc. Some exceptions might be vendors like Olimex.
edit: Hrrm. Actually that seems a little bit overblown. Seems like they've upped their stuff. I just remembered them from a few years ago, when they had much smaller things on offer. Or misremember them for something else, were you could use them as something like 74xx replacement, with emerging support for open toolchains.
But still, interesting. So I won't erase this ;>
The real question is do we even need displays for those? A few buttons and a knob is all we need
OTOH ~10 leds with logos on the 25yo water heating machine works almost perfectly to inform be the current state (auto/manual) and low/high pressure, restart required and maintenance required.
The temperature is displayed with a needle dial.
They also document the error codes:
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/troubleshoot/TSG10000997/...
But as mentioned most big appliances usually have a small service manual tucked inside the chassis somewhere. Those will have these instructions and the table to decipher the error codes, along with some basic troubleshooting steps. It might also include official part numbers to replace components which might have failed. This is often true for washing machines, dryers, fridges, dishwashers, stuff like that.
On my GE units it even stores recent codes in case it experienced multiple different issues while running. You can cycle through the history in the maintenance mode.
I do agree though, in the end you still probably need the table to decipher the error codes.
Computerized gadgets should help us diagnose and fix issues, not hinder! Good luck on your future wrenching on your own stuff :)
Think wireless JTAG for dummies/consumers.
So much security assumes those pins will never see headers!
I could, for example, design and make an open source controller board suitable for a microwave oven. But how do I sell microwave ovens competing on price with people who have been building microwave ovens for decades and have basically perfected the art?
How do I stop companies in China from taking my controller design and selling it at half the price?
I would love to do exactly that, but so far I have not found any way how I could do that and still have a regular salary. Of course, I could do it for free as a generous gift to Chinese factories who will then produce things and flood Amazon with it ... but they won't reciprocate and donate back to the Open Source project. The OS project will quickly stagnate and future development stops.
The fix is that the Open Source project needs to sell hardware, or else there's no revenue to fund further development. And that means you now also need FCC and CE certification. And you need patents. Or else, Chinese factories will flood Amazon with your design. (but without paying for FCC/CE)
But now that you can successfully sell hardware to fund future development and you can fend off Chinese clones, your project is not really "open" anymore. It's kind of like an OEM module that is "source available". Like the Adafruit kits that you can order from Amazon/Arrow.
E.g. many Haier/Candy mostly use esp32 microcontrollers, led displays don't even need modules, lcd displays use usually one of few standards, etc.
A cheap microwave costs 50euros, a washing machine 200, that's retail price with a 5year warranty, sometimes even with delivery, there is no place for modules that noone will actually use.
That. I have a rather enclosed (little ventilation) ceiling fixture that in theory is supposed to be specced for up to 2 x 75 W incandescent. You'd think it will handle 2 x 9 or 12 W led "bulbs" just fine, right?
It killed one averagely priced led "bulb" every 2 years until i switched to a slightly more expensive brand.
Edit: and I just realized, the mac mini i'm mostly typing code/emails/comms on idles at less than the 2 x 12 W bulbs above it...
Not encountered those? You people need to get onto Aliexpress where the good stuff that takes 18650 batteries is.
Also it's a good exercise in making sure the electrical panel is labeled correctly. Ours was somehow only labeled like 75% correctly.
> The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice.
In this case, as LEDs become easier and more accessable to implement, they are implemented worse in practice.
The effect of this is LED lightbulbs that have a shorter lifetime than incandescent lightbulbs did in my apartment. At least incandescent and halogen bulbs were just a bit of glass and wire: explicitly disposable. But LED bulbs are full of parts and boards and the like and generate far more waste.
I have have bought a lot of LED bulbs in search of this. Is there something that I am missing or is LED just not capable of producing the same spectrum of color as Halogen? When I look at my items under LED and then look at them under Halogen its like the items become vivid.
The best I could find is this company called "Waveform Lighting" that sells very high CRI bulbs for like ~$20 a bulb (with the second place being Soraa bulbs) both are some of the best LED bulbs I've used but no where near the effect of Halogen. What am I doing wrong?
It's a database of light bulbs tested using a 1-meter barium sulfate integration sphere and calibrated lumen photospectrometer. Although no LED comes close to the Halogen in terms of CRI, it is very informative.
It would have tickled my funny bone if they'd gone with "Green" in this case.
(Thanks nonetheless to ilove_banh_mi, for setting the record straight)
The knee-jerk cynical "hot takes" on this site are getting really tiresome. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness. Anyone can say this sort of zero-calorie edgy nonsense
It's like the sustain pedal on a piano: nothing actively dampens the sound, so the sound will continue for quite a while longer than is typically required.
Hence, you could get some decent power savings doing this.
I wonder if this is commonly known. I've mentioned it to a couple EEs over the years, and they were able to reduce the power consumption of their devices.
If the cycling of the light on and off is done at say 10kHz it's perceived as a dim light.
In practice, traditional dimmers are not quite PWM as they do not generate a square wave. Instead they generate a sin wave with portions of each cycle clamped to 0.
LEDs already need driver circutry to condition the relativly high AC voltage into a stable lower voltage DC. Dimmable LEDs create a stable DC power supply from the chopped up AC power, then use the width of the active portions of the AC as a signal to drive their own dimmer logic.
It obviously wouldn't work that way when lighting a room, but what about for an LED indicator light that you look at directly? I don't know enough to form an opinion.
The "fully bright" part is a consequence of human vision. Your brain is making sense of limited, noisy information coming from your eyes. A flickering light appears brighter than the light in steady state, lots of still images shown in rapid succession look like they're moving, as far as you can tell you can perceive the full range of colour out of the corner of your eyes, and the dress could be either colour.
What you're describing is likely saccadic masking, where the brain suppresses visual input during eye movements. It "freezes" perception just before a saccade and masks the blur, extending the perception of a "frame" up to the point in time of the sharp onset of masking. That's how you get a still of a partially illuminated frame instead of the blended together colors.
I’m no expert in this, but if you're curious, check out the Wikipedia pages on interstimulus interval, saccadic masking, chronostasis, and related research.
Now, I only measured two bulbs, but I am pretty darn happy with those results. I also opened one of their chargers and haven't looked elsewhere for chargers since. The thing was even more well built than my apple charger (the 45w sjöss is actually quite crazy. The 30w had some issues)
Wild...yeah, I know. Heard that from a buddy in Austin over a decade ago. Vaguely recall that he had to redesign using some sort of current driver instead to avoid the legal encumbrance.
The white color produced by full-on of R, G, and B is quite ghastly, so modern ones come with an individual white LED (and frequently a second warm white LED) in the package for a total of four or five individual color LEDs in the single light (RGBW or RGBWW).
I'm glad I didn't take up Electrical Engineering as a major. All the fun of using signal generators and oscilloscopes is gone. Just program a Raspberry Pi to do it. or a circuit simulator on your computer. Sigh. EE is no fun without getting accidentally zapped by A/C once in a while or letting the smoke trapped in a transistor out.
It's like hotrodding a car by plugging in a laptop. Ehhh no.
An addendum to this that you may find interesting -- I've experimented with turning the LED on for a few microseconds at higher than rated current, then off for tens of milliseconds. The average current stays far below the specifications. This results in very high apparent brightness per unit of power consumption.
Using the IV curve of the LED, this also let me eliminate the typical current-limiting resistor. The power savings are more than the power cost of the MCU that controls it (modern low-power microcontrollers are awesome).
Anyway, the end result is a little LED + CR2032 cell + magnet that you stick to furniture, and it runs for about 3 years. I made it so that elderly people I know who wake up at night to go to the bathroom don't bump into furniture (especially in an unfamiliar place, like while traveling). Without creating a thing they have to think about often. If you're curious, I posted the code here: https://github.com/seanboyce/tinylight
An additional one you might like: I did PWM for LED dimming in the tens of Mhz for some 1 Watt red LEDs. This is for my wife -- when she has a migraine she prefers very dim red light to complete darkness. In the Mhz range, there's no visible flicker by a longshot (although it costs a little more power). Most PWM systems I've seen that flicker, use lower-frequency signals.
It must have been cool to play with LEDs in the 70s. We sort of take them for granted now, but they are so awesome. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
A pretty slow version of this is used in your microwave or airfryer. But they typically use a temperature sense (like a bimetallic strip) to turn the heating parts on for at least a few seconds and then turn it off again; they don't use a timer.
This is known as bang-bang control.
I mean, people putting their foods in a Faraday cage and then pointing a cavity magnetron at them to cook them? It sort of sounds far-fetched.
Bimetallic strips are also so awesome. Every time I hear that little 'click' noise, I think about them.
Is there a term for knowing just enough about the technology that underlies daily life, that you feel mildly absurd using it for mundane tasks?
One could typically learn much more electronics from the application notes or maintenance manuals of the vendors than from university courses.
This included LEDs. For instance Hewlett-Packard published a good handbook for their LEDs, where many useful techniques for designing with LEDs were explained, including what you mention, that LEDs may have higher luminous efficiency at very high currents, so for achieving a given luminous flux you may save energy by operating them with pulsed currents.
The use of multiplexing in the interfaces of multi-digit/multi-character LED displays (e.g for clocks or calculators) not only reduces the number of wires in the interface, but it also improves the energy efficiency, because only one digit/character is powered on, at a much higher current, but for a much shorter duration in comparison with a non-multiplexed display.
During the golden era of electronics documentation, it could be difficult to get the vendor documentation, even if it was usually free, when you were located far away, e.g. in another country.
When the Internet has appeared, for a short time it solved this problem so you could be located at the other end of the world and still access easily the datasheets, application notes and user manuals.
Unfortunately, very soon after that, towards the end of the nineties and much more since 2000, the quality of technical documentation has degraded tremendously, so you now have easy access, but to much less useful information.
You want anything more than a 2 page marketing fluff piece? Talk to the sales! If you agree to a MOQ of 50000 and sign away your soul in a two miles long NDA, then you can have a look at the documentation. With one eye only. For a couple minutes.
My point would be that the LEDs are now so cheap and good that the rest of the devices seem expensive by comparison and manufacturing can't resist the urge to wrap them in crap. I think I've purchased 30 bicycle lights in total. The Edison bulbs with dynamo sometimes last a hundred years (except from the replaceable bulb)
The amount of light is great but we have a lot of "narrow" bike paths and people point them forwards blinding the opponent.
For those who know English as a second language , opponent is a term used to describe the person you are competing against in a sports event, or fighting with, in a battle!
AFAIK None of them will ever have continuous spectrum (like the sun or incandescent bulbs), that's a limitation of the physics how they make light.
Note that extending the lifetime is key to taking advantage of their lower base material cost. Lot of work needed there.
Perovskites are a particular physical structure that atoms can form together. It looks like a box made of one element, with one atom of another element inside inside the box. Perovskites are named after the naturally-occurring mineral that exhibits this structure.
Mother Nature's Perovskite is made of Calcium and Titanium. Synthetic, flourescent perovskites are made of Lead and Cadmium. You can see the problem here.
And yes, Lead is a massive problem even if the article downplays it somewhat. You can't put lead things outside, because rain will cause lead to leech into water supplies. That's bad.
- light quality, especially years ago, was much too harsh. Color is still just barely tolerable for certain bulb types.
- inability to dim without flickering
- random burnouts (wasn't this supposed to take 10 years at least?)Don't we all... but somehow I get the feeling that something was "lost in translation" here?
https://www.eea.europa.eu/help/glossary/eea-glossary/cradle-...
Sustainable ? Made from tropical forest trees ?