Slashdot Mirror
A Monster LED Array For Irresponsible Fun
Tesladownunder writes "This huge LED is on steroids and then some. It is intended for use as a streetlight. It has a 7000 lumen output at 100W and will burn a hole in a CD case without focusing. And that's without the infrared that a halogen or discharge lamp has. Very efficient and low maintenance. Stronger than HID car headlights or a 500W halogen. Hit the site for lots of data and pics of it in action including burning and irresponsible bicycle luminosity. You'll want one to attach to your keyring, too."
Isn't the goal for a light source to turn as much of the power as possible into light rather than heat? Why is being able to burn a whole in a CD case a good thing for a light?
There are some hints about this issue in the source code:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>LED's</title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="black 0111, default">
<meta name="Microsoft Border" content="none, default">
</head>
The horror! The horror!
"Nature is indifferent to our values, and can only be understood by ignoring our notions of good and bad." (B. Russell)
Ugliness? It looked liked totally trashed HTML to me. No images, visible code, broken tables... How can somebody post a link to this?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Somehow I think this might be an unsafe thing to have....
Luckily we don't currently walk around for 1/2 the day under a light source that's hot enough to burn a hole through a CD case (if it's placed close enough)...
Hey?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
That's a real nerd solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. If the person who made that website wants people to read it it should render correctly in most browsers. Apparently (s)he doesn't care who reads his/her website so I'm not going to bother.
-- Cheers!
IE is "most browsers", if you want to think about it that way.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
It's functional on IE 6. Which really doesn't do much for this guys geek cred.
You can be a geek without being a computer geek. Maybe his thing is electronics and not coding.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
Also, both high pressure sodium and low pressure sodium lamps(2 most common street lamps) have a more pleasant spectrum on the eyes.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that low pressure sodium lamps have a pleasant spectrum before. Sure, the bright monochromatic yellow may be intriguing to look at, but the world it illuminates is a weird ghostly yellow and black landscape. In fact, they make a good total-color-blindness simulator. There's a reason that despite the power efficiency, low pressure sodium is used only for utility lighting, and it's the color rendering (that and the restart time).
With LED lighting, you could potentially save power by turning on full illumination only in areas in use, and keeping unoccupied outdoor areas much dimmer. LEDs can be turned on and off quickly, with negligible startup and restart times. I'm sure that would require careful planning for gradually lighting up an area to avoid dazzling pedestrians or drivers and not creating a flashing-neon-sign film noir effect for people sleeping indoors nearby, but there could be potential. An unused light turned off is very efficient.
I am not a crackpot.
Depends on your definition of "pleasant". Orange/Yellow light doesn't affect our nightvision as much as other colors. I can see that as a pretty significant reason to use sodium lamps as streetlights.
I hate to ruin the party, but 70 lumens per watt is pretty terrible.
Yes. As comparison, a regular light bulb gives you about 15 lumen per watt.