Thursday, August 27, 2009

Seeing the light


The simplest way to use an LED is shown above. This is a standard white LED (rated at 20 milliamps) directly connected to a power source: in this case a 3Volt Lithum cell. It's not superbright, but a lot of small flashlights work this way and it puts out enough light to see your way in the dark. It's called direct drive because there are no electronics between the LED and the power source and if you choose the LED and battery/cell carefully, it's a great way to do smaller lighting projects.

This method also works with high power LEDs; you just have to be careful not to use too large a battery or you can overheat the LED which will destroy it.

In the next post, we'll look at more common ways of connecting LEDs to power sources.

Why?

So, why did I create Yet Another Blog?

Lighting is one of those areas where art and engineering converge. Light is both useful and expressive at the same time and it lets me explore my creative as well as my technical side.

LEDs make playing with light easier than any other technology around today. They're "Green" in that a huge amount of light is produced for a small amount of electricity and that efficiency is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. Their tiny size makes it easier to fit them into smaller projects allowing us to work in scales from the microscopic to the truly huge.

So hopefully this will be a way to share my work and knowledge with the rest of the world.


We'll talk more about how to use LEDs than the technology itself. New types of LEDs and increasing efficiency is interesting, but actually putting them to work is a lot more fun! While LEDs by definition require electronic circuits to work, those circuits can be very simple and effective. I'll try to avoid complicated diagrams where possible and if I make things too difficult, hopefully I can rely on you, the reader, to smack me back down to reality :-)


If you're not technologically inclined, that's fine. I'd love to communicate with artists, hobbyists, experimenters in addition to those in industry. So make comments, ask questions, give me suggestions: I'm open to all.