Basically our hourses are 1-3 orders of magnitude dimmer than the outside; this is not good. Ben Kuhn's approach was to buy a big 30k lumen LED bulb for $100. I am doing a more DIY approach with a number of small LED COBs. Each finished module will output 13.5k lumens for a bit less than $100 (so multiple will be needed per room), but it comes with a number of benefits:
- The light is extremely high quality, almost the exact same as sunlight. Fluorescent bulbs and normal LEDs do not give off the full spectrum of visible light we get from the sun and incandescent bulbs. In fact I tried growing some plants indoors a while ago, and even though they were seemingly well-lit they ended up dying due to a lack of light.
- The light can be dimmed to warm. Each module has four LED COBs. Three are bright white and put out 13.5k total lumens. The other one is a warmer white which should be useful at night - like IRL flux/redshift. And these can all be dimmed smoothly from 100% to 1% brightness.
- The modules are controlled with an ESP8266, so they have WiFi. Aside from controlling them via a phone/computer, I am going to set up a Raspberry Pi running some timed scripts to automatically adjust them. For example they can all turn on in the morning as a natural wake up alarm (I have a separate alarm clock project I'm working on to give this a normal physical alarm clock interface). And I'm going to investigate using PIR sensors to make them automatically respond to human presence.
In the end this method is a bit more expensive than just buying high power bulbs (and more expensive than buying normal bulbs, but you would need like 70 of them in a room to match the total light output), but it has a number of seemingly useful advantages. Right now I'm working on the second (and hopefully final) prototype; the first was electrically OK but had thermal issues (LEDs still get very hot!).
It's an interesting break from normal software engineering. There's a huge emphasis on getting it right, and on getting it right the first time. Since there are a couple of amps of power running through the system, it needs to be well designed and safe from the very beginning. And $6 shipping every time you order from DigiKey punishes iteration heavily, since if you're making small iterations then your shipping will be much more expensive than the parts. I spent probably around 60 hours researching before making the first order. After finding out that the thermal solution was inadequate I spent a bunch of time theoretically fixing that and finishing up every single loose end (up to well over 100 hours total now). So now my second order will very likely result in a 100% complete, functional, and safe (I think!) product.
The only thing left is to design a lamp-style enclosure. The module is small enough to replace a lightbulb in an overhead socket, but the wiring would need to be changed slightly and working through a small hole in the ceiling is not really practical.
