DIY LED-Illuminated Sleep Chamber

Bulldozer2003 writes "'Finally something both nerdy AND sexy engineers can do.' It sounds like an oxymoron but this guy took a cue from The Vos Pad and decked out his own dorm room bed with Light Emitting Diodes. They're even fully adjustable 'allowing me to create every color of the rainbow.' Total cost, according to him in an email: 'Around $25, the LEDs cost me about $0.25 a piece in bulk, and the potentiometers cost about $6 a piece from digikey. I got the LM317 voltage regulators as a free sample from Texas Instruments. Lots of companies will ship you free samples, its a good deal for college students.'"

Comments

Samples

[vectra14]

The fact that the writeup included the bit about samples is really kinda dumb. Moderation is key. Samples are great but if every idiot starts sampling everything (which i'm sure will be a side effect of the present article) companies will stop sampling or make it more difficult.

in general, the state of slashdot is shameful these days. i dont have a solution (aside from simple obvious things like submission moderation, etc)... maybe i've just changed enough that it isnt the place for me anymore. which is a shame. cause from my POV slashdot aspires to be about Cool Things. the latest microsoft bug isnt a cool thing. it isnt news. (to adapt what John Stewart said about a transmission from Hussein).

and all of this Geek Nerd etc shit. I think the US population is nuts about trying to group people (including themselves!) into groups of like scales. I havent seen anything like it anywhere else (i live in US and have lived in other places).

anyway what was i gonna say? oh yeah:
to anyone who reads it - if you sample, please, PLEASE sample in moderation so that people that actually build prototypes and such (like *this) continue to have this wonderful resourse availible.

Re:Samples

[eclectro]

I agree. It's being pretty cheap sampling LM317s when you can get them anywhere, unlike exotic new parts.

But maybe that's why he got them. They are cheap enough to throw a couple to a college student, and TI gets good publicity from it.

I have had mixed luck getting samples in the past telling companies I was a college student. Sometimes I got them, sometimes not. Most companies at the time wanted to know how many thousands you were going to buy. Not if you were doing a college project. My friends had similar experiences. But this was twenty years ago. Things are different now with the internets.

Now I much rather prototype with off the shelf, because that means most likely that the part is widely available and you won't have problems getting production quantities.

It started with PIC (and Dallas) making things easier by selling onesy twosy to anybody.

It paid off by their chips gaining wide popularity.

I also think that is what lead to thicker digi-key catalogs. I remember when they were pamphlets.

Re:Electric bill?

[Lisandro]

Very little. LEDs are very efficient power-wise and suck relatively little current; normal LEDs light at maximum with about 10-15mA, after that
they burn out pretty quickly.

The power depends on the voltage, but, say, if you use a 12v power supply and light a 100 of those you'd be using just a tad under 20 watts. That's less than a cheap bulb, and trust me, it would light just a bit brighter ;)

As a matter of fact, LEDs are quite a neat lighting solution; they're cheap, awfully efficient and have a long working life. The thing is that, atleast until recently, clear light LEDs were unavaiable. Those are hard to make, and even then, white light LEDs are not very pure, color wise. Flashlights are beggining to carry LED diodes, for one.

what the hell has /. become

[DJCF]

Ok, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna post a "what the hell is this place comming too" post. Jesus, here's some guy who has done a rather awesome thing. Can we please just admire it for what it is without all the name calling? Jesus the tagline is "news for NERDS" - basicly everyone here so can we just stop it with the cheapshots and one-liners? And please, no more smart areses talking about getting laid. With that attitude you never will.

For those who were seriously interested in this project can I refer you to the link a fellow poster posted: it s more interesting.

not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

Sex by any kind of electric light just does not work for me. Gotta be candles, I'm afraid.

Re:What the guy is probably thinking....

[Dr. Evil]

I disagree about the immaturity and stupidity part. People forget what it was like to be a teenager. Teenagers do more living between 15 and 16 than most people do between 30 and 40... and I mean that.

The biggest difference between teenagers and adults is that kids have nothing to live for. Yes, nothing. They have some vauge "future" people talk about, but they've always had that, they didn't have to earn it, and it's many times their current adult lifetimes away.

Imagine if you had no money, no house, no reputation, no education, no kids, no spouse... nothing in your life which you've had to earn, nothing in your life which you'd be afraid to lose. Now multiply out your horomones, shrink your freedom to nearly zero... what little shelter, food and money you haev is entirely dependant upon the whims of your parents.

Hiding from unreasonable parents becomes suddenly very important. Suddenly getting a condom or taking a pill becomes very dangerous to your immediate well being... well, for your forseeable future anyways (it's unreasonable to see past 5-10 times your adult life out to age 25 or so)

Giving your kids a place to hang out is great, I think it is a HUGE help. Make sure that if you have multiple kids, you aren't going to create conflict if they don't like hanging out around one another, and as tough as it might be, you've got to accept that they will have sex down there... else they'll just go into the back seat of their friend's car, or to the drunken party down the street. Not supplying condoms down there is using the fear of pregnancy or disease to keep them absinent. That doesn't work.