New Age Lighting

Your desk lamp probably has an incandescent light bulb in it, emitting yucky yellow light. After a few months, the bulb screws up at the worst moment ever, and you smash the lamp onto the floor in anger because you don't have a spare bulb...and then you're $30 poorer after you buy a new lamp...

Exploring the world of new age lighting...

Image courtesy of CureZone

1. The Halogen Bulb

Halogen bulbs are basically the same as incandescent bulbs, but have added halogen gasses. Halogen gasses are, I think, the 7th period on the periodic table. Yeah, anyway basically they operate at much higher temperatures, and that's why you DON'T substitute halogen bulbs into torches designed for incandescent bulbs, unless you want a puddle of plastic on your feet.

I got a few of these bulbs and did a quick 5 minute lash up job. They operate on 12V, and are 50W each. The bundle there to the left is a hefty 200W of light bulbs.

And the 'thing' being powered up. Upon power up, the heat is terribly intense. You can feel it about a meter away, feels like the sun's rays on a hot day in Darwin...

I've killed ants about 10cm away just with the heat that's emitted from this thing. If I left it on for more than half a minute, the plastic base would start to melt.

2. The CCFL tube

I bet you've never even wondered what kind of lamp lights up your computer monitor. A CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent light) does that job. I got one from Jaycar Electronics a while ago...

Pure white light emission, and uses so much less power than that mutha f'king incandescent bulb.

And you can pretend you're a Jedi Knight.

3. The Sodium Vapour Bulb

If you really do like yellow light and was offended by the first paragraph on this page, well this bulb is for you.

Low pressure sodium vapour bulbs are the most efficient light bulbs ever made, and even surpasses the efficiency of high-tech LED's.

As seen in the graph... sodium light is very close to the maximum sensitivity point of the human eye.

You can find sodium lights in streetlights, car parks, and universities at night.

Image courtesy of LampTech UK

I happened to find a nice collection of 8 sodium vapour lamps at the uni that no one wanted anymore. Out of the 8, only 2 were still operational, so the rest were kept for a bit of glass smashing fun later on.

Sodium lamps have a crap ass long warm up time, about 5 to 10 minutes, so it would really suck to have one as your desk lamp.

Here is one of the operational sodium lamps during the warm-up phase.

And during proper operation....

Sodium light is the worst for colour identification. Everything that is illuminated by sodium light just loses colour and becomes a YUCKY shade of yellow and grey.

That's also why you shouldn't use these for reading.

4. The Light Emitting Diode (LED)

Ah, the most versatile and high-tech of all lights, the LED. The digital clock in your room has LED's arranged in patterns to produce numbers. The light that indicates your computer is on is also a LED. In your car, office, wherever the hell you are, LED's are simply everywhere.

LED's are also magical in the sense that they come in different colours. They used to be either green, or red. Now they even come white!

Image courtesy of Iwiess

Super brightness LED's now literally flood the market. LED's with brightness' of over 10,000mcd (milli-candela) are everywhere (if you know where to look).

Here is me illuminating a glass bottle with a super bright white LED.

I never took many photos of my LED projects, because I never thought they were fascinating. I built one particular unit that had 80 LED's arranged in the form of my last name, and a specially designed circuit to modulate the brightness of certain sections randomly.

This space is intentionally blank

Er, right now I can't think of much more stuff I've done on lighting, apart from xenon flash lamps, which are impossible to take pictures of anyway.