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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.'"
Practically nothing. The whole thing probably draws less power than one low-energy lightbulb.
As a U of I student myself, I wonder the same thing. The whole "netfiles" WebDAV system (which replaced the good ol' unix accounts we used to have) is all https, even for webpages.
This means that if you have image references on your webpages to external sites web browsers bitch about having some secure and some non-secure elements on a page, for one thing.
But, in short, yes, we at the U of I are trying to shoot ourselves in the head with this, just as we're shooting ourselves in the head with our new web-based registration system that's not designed to handle half the number of students we have and makes getting permission to register for certain classes a lot more work for everyone involved.
Not ALL geeks have issues getting women! ;)
;)
Make sure you differentiate "Geek" with "Nerd"
But back to the point. I do enjoy lighting, and i know for a fact girls do love discrete lighting such as this. I have used blue Cold cathodes in a similar fashion shining up onto the ceiling, together with carefull use of blacklight and ultra violet reflecting paint in certain areas can give an intresting look, and can certainly increase "the mood" when its, ahem, "needed".
Being a "geek".. i do have my computer in my room. But its a more an entertainment system, for TV, playing DVDs, Music, when its not being used for "work" and is pretty stylish, again with tasteful use of blue cathodes.
Question for the peeps out there.. I have a Wall Mounted flat panel display. And I am intrested to knwo if there is any "matchbox" computers, with no hard disk, and low power processor.. which use little power, but can display a slide show, or some sort, so my display can become a "virtual painting" when not being used as a computer. Is it possible to build one?
Have a nice day!
EE Projects got me laid by some pretty damn hot chicks more than a few times - Especially if you offer to "pimp" their room with something cool for fun ;-) ...and no, it's not paying - I would have done it regardless. It's fun to add a vent that'll allow smoking, and put set-up projectors just to play Super Smash Bros on N64 (another chick magnet). Me and my roommate had our dorm on lockdown from day one!
Me-Fi-Me!
Of course, as we all know, "low energy" compact fluorescents are a waste of time *anyway*, because their power factor is so awful that twice as much energy again must be dissipated at the substation to compensate...
actually, I did this in the theatre room in the basement for my daughter. spent less than $1000.00 and got enough club effects lights to make it look exactly like a dance club, espically with a xmms vis running on the 10 foot screen.
It's great, the kids all want to come here, I know where she is and I know that there is no booze or other naughty things going on.
(OMFG! I am opressing my daughters right to illegally drink, do drugs and have sex! I am so fricking evil!!)
I remember being a teen, and if my parents made the basement cool at home I would have spent more time there instead of other people's parties.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My daughter wants lights in her Barbie house (seriously!), and I thought it should probably be easy with these newer bright LEDs and a battery, but I really know nothing about this.
/. about that, but since the topic came up...
:-)
Wouldn't have thougt of asking
Anyway, I'd rather find the solution than send my daughter asking that guy for advice...
Can I directly connect these to a battery, or do I need some circuit in-between?
Which sort of LED is it that I want? I mean, how do I recognise and select the right type in a catalogue? Or what more specific keyword do I add to "LED" to find relevant information on Google?
I have three filament bulbs in my home -- that's including one in the fridge and one in the sewing machine. {No light in the oven. I was thinking to fix a gas mantle on a wire so that it could be lowered into or out of the burner to provide a light; but I changed my mind when I found out what was in them. Besides which, haven't you ever heard of baking blind? :) } The third one is in my bedside lamp; it's on a turn-for-off dimmer switch {thus precluding any kind of fluorescent} and so tends to last about five years at a stretch. This is only ever on for short periods like long enough to get out of bed and put the main light on, or perhaps an hour of reading. Everything else is lit by compact fluorescents {with a standard push-and-twist base fitting like any ordinary light bulb; note that the cheaper ones are only double-folded and so longer than the more expensive triple-folded ones} except the loft, which is lit by "ordinary" fluorescent strip lights. {Unfortunately they're low power factor types, but just require some additional capacitors to correct this. Anyway, the main issue with low power factor is voltage drop in the cable, and I happen to know there's less than 10 metres of 1.0mm2 copper T&E cable from the fusebox to the luminaire in this case.}
If you're retrofitting, compact fluorescents are the obvious way of doing it. If you're wiring from scratch, it might be worth using small fluorescent striplights. Avoid halogen lights at any cost -- they're still filament bulbs. It may be worth arranging rooms so as to take advantage of natural daylight as far as possible. I guess I'm lucky living in a Victorian two-up-two-down, since this would have been designed with the sun as the primary illumination source. Judging by the evidence I've seen, the building was first wired for electricity sometime early last century {definitely before WWII} and completely re-wired about 25 years ago.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Better still, Fry's has Christmas lights made of LEDs going for $9.99 for a box of 50/100, I don't remeber exactly. It has different colors but a constant illumination. Maybe you can just work on it to make interesting things and would be more safe also, and they also provide some warranty too.
I'm proud to be a huge nerd, then. I have a two-story house with an upstairs hallway that, when lit with all the lights on the switch, is bright enough to do surgery with. Sometimes, you want that kind of brightness, but not at 2am as you make your way to the stairs for a late night snack.
So, rather than switch out the bulbs to lower wattages in the evening/morning, I hooked up about 6 strands of LED Christmas lights and ran them around the door/wall frames, set on a timer for dusk/dawn. Works great, and since the power consumption is so low, I leave them on all night, 365 days a year. Plus, it gives the hallway a very festive look year-round.
They are just bright enough to see by in the dark, and they also run up and down the stairs, so you can see the steps and not trip.
It was pretty tricky finding these strings of lights two years ago, but they're probably much easier to locate now.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson