Wanting to replace a power hungry halogen lamp in the living room, [Jason Dorie] went out to design a Remote Controlled, Dimmable Led Lamp (pictures). The body of the lamp is a pretty interesting idea, sporting a couple waste baskets with a translucent HDPE skin as the lampshade and a PVC column for structure.
The column is wrapped in a spiral of 16 foot long led strips , and are wired so they can be controlled in groups. Light output is (estimated) at about the same as a 100-150 watt incandescent while only consuming 24 watts.
The lamp is controlled via a universal remote and features a TLC5940 driven by a Propeller, all sitting on a CNC machined PCB. With that much horsepower under a lamp you can expect that it will not just simply dim in and out, so join us after the break for a video to see how to turn on a lamp with style.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8H9-FBXlFY&w=450]
Any ideas on how well the light is diffused through the “lamp shade”? Are you still able to see the points from the LEDs? I really like this for a “man cave” I’m designing for a friend. Maybe with a different colored shade to lean more towards incandescent light than fluorescent or LED. The white light may be too harsh for the surrounding woodwork.
The diffusion is pretty good – you can make out the individual LEDs, but they’re fuzzy.
It seems like the Propeller chip is catching on. Including mine, there seems to be a lot of Propeller-based projects lately.
@ Danman1453. Why not just sub out the White strips with RGB’s? might drive up the cost but then you could set the “mood” or maybe even put a microphone in it to allow it to go by the beat of music.
Lots of possibilities here..
That doesn’t look like the equivalence of a 100-150W incandescent light. You cannot look directly into a 150W incandescent light bulb. And those are bright enough to light up a whole room.
Still a cool build.
Remember that this “bulb” is 4 feet long, spreading the light output over that whole area. It’s hard to compare because it’s not on the ceiling, which limits the throw somewhat.
Nice! This gives me some inspiration to hack my Ikea Textur which has a noisy dimmer.
wonder where he sourced the hdpe sheet?
Tap Plastics.
Daid: I think that’s a trick of the camera. The camera is pointed at a bright object… Notice that the room starts out bright, and gets dark when the camera adjusts to look at the bright light.
It’d be interesting to see the fade effect on this traveling from top to bottom like a bouncing ball.
Jason, could you provide some details about the light strips that you used?
I like your design a lot, and would like to try something similar.
Are the individual pixels addressable? Or did you just cut the strips into smaller sections that can light up?
Thanks
Rogan
The strips are 1 foot sections from a 16 foot roll of warm white LEDs bought from Amazon for about $40. Each 1 foot strip is addressable, but not the individual LEDs. The LED driver chip used can be daisy chained, so you could use more drivers and cut the strips into shorter segments – the code to run more segments is almost identical.
A 150 W bulb would make about 2000 lumens of light, so his leds would be about 81 lumens per watt, which is about right. The diffuser takes some out of that of course.
Though if you used a long fluorescent tube with an electronic ballast, you’d get about 2500 lumens.
Love it. If I weren’t so lazy I might actually consider building something similar.
An 8-core microcontroller for this? Now that’s just overkill.