[57north-discuss] lighting the space

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014, at 11:58 PM, Robert McWilliam wrote:
> I have 10 10W LEDs and a power supply that can drive them. Calum has
> volunteered to source appropriate switches and a box for to put them in
> and we have plans to wire that up and have much light available (the
> same as the 100W LED but from 10 points rather than 1). 

I did some playing with a couple of the LEDs last night. These are eBay
rated 10W LEDs that actually max out at about 3W, but at that power
they're a bit unstable and some of the array switches on and off
annoyingly. Running them at about 1.5W they look to be prefectly stable
so I'm now targeting that.

Looking at the amount of light they kick out running in that set up I
still think they're useful.  One advantage of being much lower power
than originally claimed is that there is no need to worry about the
heat: I left one on for more than an hour yesterday with only the flat
thin metal permanent heatsink and it only got to 30°C (I did some
playing with wrapping it in paper to see if reducing airflow
possibilities would make a difference - it didn't). 

Because this was looking like a project that wouldn't involve any coding
I have tagged on some plans to make a stupidly complex control system.
The plan now has a switch and relay for each LED so that they can be
switched by either, wire the relays to an arduino along with some
sensing of what position the toggle switches are in and then make a web
page on doorbot that can control the lights. We could also put some
intelligence in there to have automatic lights... 

Robert
-- 
Robert McWilliam      rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

Disclaimer: Opinions cited by me are not necessarily my opinions. 
Facts cited by me are not necessarily facts.