NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Fireflies Inspire Brighter LEDs

LEDs are bright, but they don't shine as bright as their potential. That's because when light emits from an LED, some of it gets reflected back inside. 

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To make LEDs brighter, researchers are taking a cue from the firefly. In fireflies, a chemical reaction makes the light, which then emits through the insect’s exoskeleton, called the cuticle. Covering the cuticle are tiny scales that each have jagged edges. Each scale is about 10 micrometers long and makes a little slope that reaches 3 micrometers high. Computer simulations showed that the light at those edges was brighter.

A team of scientists from Belgium, France, and Canada, led by Annick Bay, decided to do something similar with LEDs. They put a layer of light-sensitive material on top of LEDs and then using a laser, created a sawtooth pattern, with each “peak” about 5 microns high. The structure minimized the reflection and boosted the LED's brightness by 55 percent.

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The team isn’t the first to look at fireflies. But previous efforts had focused on the tiniest structures of firefly skin, those at the nanometer scale, comparable to the wavelengths of light. This time, scientists went bigger: they looked at structures that were a thousand times larger.

The papers describing the work appear in the journal Optics Express.

Credit: Optics Express

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LEDs Light Up Central Park

Going green makes economic sense. Here's just one more great example. Nearly 1,600 iron light fixtures spread throughout Central Park have gotten a makeover. Inefficient metal halide lights have been replaced with LED bulbs, which use far less energy and last longer. The bulbs, designed by lighting and semiconductor manufacturer Cree, last 75,000 hours and are expected to save New York City $30,000 a year in maintenance fees.

via Inhabitat

Credit: Ryan Pyle/Corbis

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LED Lights Transform Park into Wonderland

Japan’s Nabana no Sato Botanical Garden, located on the island of Nagashima in Kuwana in the northern Mie prefecture, looks like a magically wonderland. Millions of LED lights have been used to create illuminated hedgerows, tunnels and trees. One installation replicates Mt. Fuji, the iconic strato-volcano in Japan.

Each year the botanical gardens light up their grounds over the holidays. The displays begin in November and run until the end of March. This year, the theme is "nature," and thank goodness they're using LEDs, which consume far less electricity than other bulbs. Every inch of the park, it seems, is lit up. 

For more photos, see My Modern Met and also Wide Island View.

via Inhabitat

Credit: ©Emrank

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Jack-O-Lantern Tetris a Halloween Treat

Millions of residents in the northeastern U.S. continue to deal with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. For those still dealing with power outages and flood waters, it's pretty safe to say that Halloween will be a wash out.

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How much of the deluge includes the salty tears of sad trick-or-treaters stuck at home might be hard to calculate, but here's something that just might dry their eyes, if not put a smile on their face: Jack-o-lantern Tetris.

The project is the brainchild of programmer Nathan Pryor who runs the website Hahabird. There he gave a detailed tutorial of how he came to make every techie's must-have Halloween gourd. The fully playable pumpkin includes 128 LEDs connected to a 12C backpack, a battery pack and an Arduino controller. Best part about it? The game's joystick is the pumpkin stem.

After finding the right-sized pumpkin, Pryor set to drilling holes for each LED, then carved squares around the holes to make the grid look pixelated. Next, he fit all the wiring through a large hole in the back of the pumpkin.

"For a controller I used [a] a short handle joystick from SparkFun, with the red ball unscrewed and replaced with the stem of the pumpkin," he explained on his website. "I think I'm going to call this the 'joystem' from now on, as disgusting as that may sound. I drilled a hole in the detached stem and epoxied in a 6mm bolt, then screwed that into a coupling nut on the joystick shaft."

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The end result: a pumpkin that can play a full game of Tetris with difficulty levels and high score tracking. There weren't any programs available that could run Tetris on his DIY LED grid, so Pryor programmed the entire game from scratch.

"Everything worked great, except for some occasional glitches in the top matrix," he wrote. "Maybe a power supply issue, but it's also possible there might be some intermittent shorts that happen when you bury that many electrical connections inside a pumpkin.

It's also weird playing with the controller on the top and the display underneath, so if I were to do it again I would wire the joystem into a separate pumpkin,either wireless or with the wire made to look like a vine."

 

via Gizmag

credit: Hahabird

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Create Your Own Bike Lane, on the Go

A mounted laser that projects bike lane lines onto the street at night joins the ranks of lit-up safety gear for cyclists. The question is: Does it actually work?

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The XFire bike lane safety light was created by a Los Angeles based company with the goal of helping bike commuters stay safe. The patent-pending light costs about $40, contains five bright red LEDs, and projects two visible red laser lines on either side of the bike. It reminded me a little of the BLAZE device, which projects a bright green shared lane symbol on the road ahead of a cyclist.

British blogger Trevor Ward recently took the XFire tail-light for a spin and described his experiences in the Guardian online. Although a dog walker was impressed by the lasers, a neighbor who followed Ward in her car said she didn't really notice the lines and didn't feel the need to give him more room.

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You might be wondering why I try the XFire out myself. The truth is I've already got some bright (and expensive) flashing bike lights, and they've made me realize that lights can only do so much.

Many Colorado drivers don't care that my bike is lit front and back, or that I'm in a bike lane with reflective painted lines, or even that the crosswalk just automatically lit up to signal that they should stop for me. There have been a bunch close calls, and I was carefully following the rules.

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Better city planning could make more of a difference. Recently several main streets in my Denver neighborhood, which hasn't historically been the most bike-friendly area, were painted with shared lane symbols. Two bike shops have also opened up. Lasers are fun, but I'm looking forward to the day when drivers expect to see bikers everywhere.

Photo: Still from a video showing the XFire laser system in action. Credit: Alex Choi

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Lifelog Yourself With Memoto

If you're quick to bemoan the over-sharing epidemic plaguing Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, the road ahead, I'm afraid, is only going to get bumpier.

However, if you're the type who thinks the world can't get enough photos of your daughter in her ballet tutu or snapshots of your brunch frittata, your ship has come in.

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Memoto is a Swedish-designed wearable device that allows a person to document every moment of her life. Simply clips it to a T-shirt and the device automatically captures a photo every 30 seconds with a 5-megapixel sensor. Once Memoto links up with a computer via Micro-USB port, the device uploads photos to the Memoto Web Service for sharing and archiving.

Each photo includes the current GPS position of the camera and a time-stamp for each image. The device is equipped with an accelerometer so every photo comes out correctly oriented regardless of how the camera is tilted. Memoto has LED lights that indicate remaining battery life and contains 8 GB of storage in a square unit the size of a matchbox.

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The Web service, which has yet to be finalized, is expected to cost five dollars a month when it's slated for release in 2013. The unit itself will cost $279 and be offered in the colors graphite, grey, white and orange.

If Memoto sounds like the kind of lifelogging gadget you need, you can contribute money to the company's Kickstarter campaign. Donate $199 and you'll receive a camera and one-year Web service subscription.

via Gizmag

Credit: Memoto

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Smartphone Controls 'Brainy,' Wi-Fi LED Bulb

In the last few years there have been a lot of attempts to reinvent the light bulb. The latest stab at it comes from a Kickstarter project called LIFX.

The LIFX is an LED light bulb that has a "brain" that allows one bulb, a "master," to connect with a local Wi-Fi network, as well as to other LIFX bulbs. Bulbs talk to each other via a slightly different protocol than the master bulb to form a mesh network.

Using an app on a smartphone, a person can control either individual lights or a whole room full of them. The light can, its inventors claim, even change color because the LEDs are red, green and blue, with the three combined providing white light and the color change coming from adjusting the relative brightness of the individual LEDs.

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The LIFX inventor, Phil Bosua, has a video on Kickstarter that claims that each bulb uses less than 10 watts of power, and produces as much light as a 60 watt bulb. At $69 -- the pledge amount that gets you one light bulb –- it's competitive with some of the higher-end models of LED bulbs. Even though one can get an LED bulb for about half that, it's also worth noting that the electronics would increase the value.

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The site also says the regular light switches in the house will keep working, so if you lose your phone it won't be as though you've lost control of the lights. It isn't clear whether the switch has to always be on for the LIFX to work, though.

Kickstarter pledges are to help someone complete a project. If the project gets funded -- raising a certain amount of money in a specific time frame -- the money goes to the inventor (or artist, or filmmaker). If not, it goes back to the contributors. Most projects in the arts offer T-shirts and the like as mementoes of contributions. But in the technology section of the site inventors offer a real product.

The goal for the LIFX project was to raise $100,000. So far, it has raised $830,000 as of this writing. The inventors say they have working prototypes and that the money will be used to build LIFX on a larger scale and fund app development. 

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That said, there has been a certain amount of skepticism about whether LIFX can deliver. Over at Reuters, Felix Salmon has noted that it's very, very difficult to get a product to market even when one has millions in backing and a well-thought-out business plan. And there are other Kickstarter projects –- notably an iPad keyboard called the Touchfire that ran into several problems with actual production. The keyboard was successfully funded (a some twenty times what the inventors asked or) in 2011; but many did not ship until just last month.

We'll keep our eye on this project to see if it lights up the LED world.

Credit: Kickstarter

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Click These Heels To Find Your Way Home

Have you ever woken up somewhere over the rainbow in a field of poppies, surrounded by a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow? Me neither. At least not yet. But it's nice to know that, when I do, as long as I'm wearing Dominic Wilcox's No Place Like Home shoes, getting my bearings straight will be as easy as clicking my heels together three times.

Wilcox, a British designer, recently showcased his latest creation: GPS shoes "that will guide you home no matter where you are in the world."

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Simply program your destination into the GPS device and the dandy leather shoes will guide the way. The GPS receiver is located in the heel of the left shoe. On the toe of the left shoe is a circle of LEDs that light up, working like a compass to point you in the direction you need to walk. On the toe of right shoe is a row of red LED lights that indicate how far you have to go. The closer you get to home, the more it lights up. Consider it the pedestrian version of the 'hot/cold' game.

"I thought about the Wizard of Oz and how Dorothy could click her shoes together to go home," Wilcox explained on his website. "After uploading your required destination to the shoes via a piece of custom made mapping software and a USB cable, the GPS, which is embedded in the heal [sic], is activated by a heal [sic] click."

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Fashionably speaking, these shoes are sharp. They boast fine gray leather with red stitching, red laces and on the soles are doodles of buildings and structures in Wilcox's distinct style.

The shoes were commissioned as part of the Global Footprint project, which invites artists and designers to explore the economic, cultural, social and environmental impact of the shoes and boots industy. The shoes are currently on display at KK Outlet in London until September 26th.

via Inhabitat

credit: Dominic Wilcox

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LED Lamp Could Be Powered By Your Tears

The wilderness got you crying in your tent? No problem! This month, a Japanese company is coming out with an LED lantern that runs on saltwater.

With the catchy name "GH-LED10WBW," this portable light runs with as little as 350 milliliters of saline -- roughly a cup and a half, according to Tech-On writers Masaru Yoshida and Nikkei Monozukuri. OK, granted, that's an insane amount of crying, but a few drips could keep the light on slightly longer.

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The light works because saltwater acts like an electrolyte between magnesium and carbon rods inside the device, producing electricity, Gizmodo's Andrew Liszewski explained. The salty setup will be good for eight hours before requiring more saline. It could also hook into a USB cable and power small devices.

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The lantern will be released mid-month by the Japanese company Green House Co., Ltd., an IT manufacturer that usually produces peripherals like memory cards and cables. This new LED lantern fits with the company's green focus on reducing air pollution, waste, wastewater and lessening their products' potential impacts on environment.

Much though I enjoy the thought of contact lens rinse doing double-duty in the mountains, the lamp still requires some water mixed with a set amount of salt in a separate bag. The magnesium rod also needs replacing after up to 120 hours. At that rate, a rechargeable battery might just be easier. Saltwater and electronics don't always play well together, either.

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This lantern strikes me as more of a novelty. If things really get desperate out on the trail, my keychain has a powerful little LED that still works after all these years.

Photo: This LED light can generate electricity from saltwater. Credit: Green House Co., Ltd. via Tech-On

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White LEDs Grown On Paper

Imagine a room with wallpaper that lights up with just a touch. A simple chemical that's used as a pigment in breakfast cereals could make that possible by allowing LEDs to be grown right on the surface of paper, or even printed onto it like ink.

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Gul Amin, a recent PhD grad from Linkoping University in Sweden, used zinc oxide, which is commonly used in many industrial processes and added to food. It's also a very good semiconductor, and has been proposed as a material for LEDs.

To make his printable ZnO diodes, he first had to grow tiny, nanometer-sized ZnO crystals. He started by coating paper in a polymer and then seeding the paper with a solution that contained zinc. After it was seeded, he coated it again with another polymer.

After that, he dipped the seeded paper into a mixture of other chemicals that induced the zinc to grow into tiny hollow rods. He added yet another polymer layer to make sure the tubes (which stand up like hairs on the paper) stayed isolated from each other. After that he etched away a portion of the very top polymer layer to expose the nanorods, and finally put down silver electrical contacts. When he sent an electrical charged through the paper, the zinc rods lit up.

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Not satisfied with that, however, Amin looked at how to make the ZnO nanorods printable, which would get him to the end result faster. For that, he had to get the nanorods off of the paper. He used ultrasound to "scrape" off the rods and then mixed them with a solution to create an ink. Using an ordinary silkscreen printing machine, he printed the ZnO onto a paper treated in a similar way to the one he used to grow the crystals. When he added a charge to the paper, the zinc ink lit up.

Patents on both methods for using ZnO have been filed, and university is continuing to explore uses for the nanomaterials.

“This is the first time anyone has been able to build electronic and photonic inorganic semiconducting components directly on paper using chemical methods,” said Amin's professor Magnus Willander in press release. Willander lead the research.

Amin's full paper describing his method can be found here.

via Linkoping University

Credit: Linkoping University / Gul Amin

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