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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.'"
...guaranteed to be sex free, no doubt!
Step 1: Light up dorm room with ludicrous light display.
...
Step 2:
Step 3: Women!
Reminds me a lot of this guy's projects. He made some damn cool things out of LEDs there, complete with howtos.
"Why should I go to a club when I can stay at home, avoid long queues, drink cheaper alcohol, set up my own light show, and have the chance to choose your own music?"
ummm.......
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Great for parties... wouldn't want to live there.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So do you mean free as in speech, or free as in beer?
Are they trying to shoot themselves in the head by using HTTPS?
and it still is, take my word as a girl for it :-)
Seattle Eastside Math and Science Tutoring
Clicking on no has no major effect that I can discern except for the guy's last box where the "Get Firefox!" icon/image is missing...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Plastic Surgery!
All your base are belong to Google.
the link wasn't working so I'll try again!
Pot signing out
Jaj
Practically nothing. The whole thing probably draws less power than one low-energy lightbulb.
If you look at the pics, he mounted all the LED's through cardboard with the wires soldered to the back.
:-D
If doing that burns down the dorm room he needs to take a course in EE!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Man who lights his bed
with a multicoloured led
will never get head
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
So this light display -- it's like a warning beacon of sorts, right? A light house, if you will, to warn the woman that the sexy guy she met at the club is an engineer and it's time to start preparing her excuses and leave, lest she crash against the inexperienced rock of his virginity.
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.
The Cheat throws a pretty good rave.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I bet his roomate absolutely hates him
25$ for 50,000 hours worth of birth control. What a bargain!
what a dork:m /imagep ages/image1.htmlm /imagep ages/image11.htmlm /imagep ages/image4.html
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/bkpeters/www/Pro
what a girl:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/bkpeters/www/Pro
what a dork?
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/bkpeters/www/Pro
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.
Most LEDs operate at a relatively low current (~20mA) and voltage (~3V). This amounts to maybe .06 Watts (60mW) per LED. It looks like he has 5 panels of 4 LEDs and a 6-LED reading lamp, from the pictures; this makes 26 LEDs, consuming around 1.5 Watts in total. This is 1/40th of the power consumption of a single 60-Watt light bulb. If we say that electricity costs $.06/kWh ("US Federal Average"), then it would cost approximately $.09 to run these lights for 1000 hours.
The kinds of LEDs will probably have different operating characteristics than those I have in my head (like those UV LEDs, which are higher frequency -and energy- than I'm used to).
Whatever it is, it will not exceed the power output of the wall wart he's using.
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!
'Finally something both nerdy AND sexy engineers can do.'
There may be plenty of nerdy engineers out there, but everybody knows there's no such thing as a sexy one...
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...
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.
Would those even be light-emitting LED diodes?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sex by any kind of electric light just does not work for me. Gotta be candles, I'm afraid.
Interesting! This guy's project basically connects a dimmer switch each to red, green and blue LED strings. The colors sorta mix, sorta producing colored light, but as you can see in his pictures there are major fringing effects (multicolored bands of light). The howto on this page, suggested by another poster, gives a much cleaner result.
The link above uses a microcontroller and pulse-width modulation to vary each color's intensity, producing a much more even color effect.
Now, of course, I want to redo the apartment with them. Eternal lighting with no more power consumption than a couple of flashlights...yum...
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?
>Would those even be light-emitting LED diodes?
Light-emiutting light emitting diode diodes? Yes they affirmatively would not wouldn't be.
anyone knows any good resources, how to switch your household as much as possible away from classical lightbulbs to LEDs and other energy saving illumination methods?
any good pointers, resources, experiences?
thanks.
And please, no more smart areses talking about getting laid. With that attitude you never will
Dude, this story was posted at 2:39 am.
Need I state the obvious for you???
If we are reading slashdot at 3:00 a.m. in the morning, there is a rather (extremely) high likelyhood that readers here do not have the company of a female.
Unless it's a mother telling us to turn out the lights.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Light-emiutting light emitting diode diodes?
- org ?
Almost like aitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot
8 points for creativity 10 points for lustful intentions 1 point for soldering
Welcome to the world, we have many timezones from GMT-12 to GMT+12. You probably live in the GMT+5 to GMT+8 zone. You may be surprised to discover that more live outside of your zone than live in it.
(Swap GMT for UTC if you think Greenwich is in Connecticut)
I don't think I could live there. It'd freak me out, like Kramer in the Kenny Rogers Roasters episode.
*looks at linux server in one corner*
:-)
*looks at linux laptop as recently reviewed on slashdot*
*looks at LED star canopy over bed*
most girls would run from such things. some have their own, thankyouverymuch
-Leigh
ps. Ubuntu is love.
I totally agree, its sad really. I think the moment I realized this was when I read the comments on the ipod halloween costume story. What a bunch of assholes!
Nothing says romance like LED lights and an extra-long twin bed.
Several manufacturers are now making high power factor compact fluorescents (power factor >0.9).
I agree that LED lighting may not be terribly efficient and there will have to be some clever work with diffusing the light but its saving grace is that the lamps will last a very long time and the lamp packages can be made very flat which will allow some interesting design changes in products which use lights (like motor vehicles for example). Applications like street lighting and traffic signals and other public space lighting are probably ideal for LED retrofit; even if the lamps cost a lot more the savings in not having to replace them anywhere near as often will pay off quickly.
The problem of getting the illumination pattern even will be solved quickly. Take apart an LCD monitor. Who would believe that that thin cold cathode lamp could illuminate an entire screen so easily? Someone will solve the problem even if you can't see how.
Putting moderation advice in your
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...
1. Even if you count VA instead of watts, a compact fluorescent bulb still draws half the VA of an incandescent bulb.
2. If that's not good enough for you, high power factor compact fluorescent bulbs are available.
3. You probably pay for Watts, not VA. Your electric meter will not charge you for reactive power.
4. If 3 is not the case in your case, you can install a power factor corrector. An active one would be preferable, but a passive one should get you some improvement.
5. There should be power factor correction at the substation, assuming that there isn't some somewhere along the line. I can point out several locations in my neighbourhood where there are power factor correctors on the poles.
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
Sure would like to read it:
Forbidden
Available bandwidth quota for this filesystem has been exceeded.
(/bkpeters/www/LEDBed/index.html)
Please, try again later.
Sleep is for the Weak
And if you look at the pics at this link you can read something written in his girlfriends yearbook, and if you look *REALLY* carefully you can see her name is Michelle, AND you can find out the email address of her friend.
*sits back and watches the geek frenzy*
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
You can tell by the fact that he wears socks with sandals that he's not trying very hard to hide his geekosity with fashion.