LED Lighting: In the (LED) Mood

Concept
Shift the lighting in your room/house to match your mood.

Background
LED lighting, though still prohibitively expensive for most of us, will become an increasingly viable alternative to incandescent and even compact fluorescents. Advantages will include both longer life and higher efficiency that we currently have today with incandescent bulbs. But LEDs will also allow a greater control over the mood of the room. Here, I propose a simple control system for in-room lighting that is compatible with your existing home wiring.

Details
The LED Concept Lighting (LCL) consists of two modules: the switch and the "bulb". The switch will be backwards compatible with existing wall switches and really only require two wires in: hot and ground. The bulb will screw into the standard set of sockets used today for lighting such as the S100 "Edison" socket or its European equivalent of the E27. See here and here for some ideas of the types of bulbs that are currently available. Current bulbs are available at a "fixed" color or frequency; they cannot be adjusted after they've been manufactured. Some have flirted with these ideas, such as this project, though I'm not sure they have expressed all of the thoughts I'm about to here (forgive me if you've done so, and I just missed it).

What will be unique about this system is the user's ability to change the light characteristics with a simple wall switch. This is far more that just a "dimmer switch", but a "mood switch". The switch will probably look much like the dimmer switches that you'll find that fit into a standard switch plate (i.e., the switch itself is narrowed a bit and there is an up/down slider on the side that governs the intensity of the light). The coolness is added with two extra controls: the three-bar slider (TBS) and the Temperature Dial (TD). The controls don't necessarily coexist well with each other, so there would need to be a small red LED above the control that is currently setting the light output. The switch would directly control all of the lights on the given circuit. High frequency data bursts could be put out on the circuit to set the parameters, similar, but much less complex than HomePlug although using it as a standard might keep the costs down.

The TBS is what it sounds like, basically a way for the user to directly control the Red, Green and Blue components of the light output. If you want the room to be "hot" and all red, just slide down the green and blue sliders and crank up the red. The possibilities are (almost) endless - to the degree of variation that each color element will allow. I'm guessing that 256 should be more than sufficient for customized coloration.

The TD is really an alternate way of adjusting the light that will be more intuitive for some people. This will, as the name suggests, set the light temperature and it will have the Kelvin markings around the edge of the dial. A range of 3000 to 5500 should probably be sufficient for most people.

The addition of the TBS and TD will require a unique faceplate to be used, but I think that as long as it follows standard conventions for everything else, it will not be a significant problem for backward compatibility.

One Step Beyond . . .
So all of that is cool, really cool actually. But it could be even cooler. How? By going One Step Beyond for this Gadget to the point where you add customizable programming for each lightbulb. Too hard - I don't think so. Here's how you do it:

The Bulb:
The bulk would need to be capable of "listening" to an outside control source and adjust the output of the three LEDs accordingly. The listening could take place over the power input (similar to the HomePlug idea floated above). The key for this to work, though is that each light has to listen and filter out instructions for other bulbs and only listen to its own instructions. Thus each light will need to effectively have its own ID or MAC address. For our purposes, instead of "Media Access Control", we need Lighting Access Control, so for fun we'll describe the address/ID as an LAC address.

The Controller:
Generally, I think that to have anything of even moderate complication, you are going to need to use a computer-based programming platform. So everything that follows, will make that assumption. The controller process consists of the following four functions: mapping the room, writing the lighting program, transferring to a dedicated controller and finally, running the program.

Mapping the room: As a first step, you'd want to map out each light's location in the room and probably associate a LAC address with each point on the map. Probably not too hard? I don't think so, but there could be a complication if the orientation of the LED lightbulb made a difference in the final program. There, the mapping may require the user to (a) take note of the LAC (b) screw the LED lightbulb and take note of the orientation with respect to the room. Orientation could be controlled by the outer ring of LEDs lighting as different colors and the user picking the best match for one of the walls. This could even work on chandeliers and such. If the system took off, you could even allow people (or manufacturers) to share models of common light fixtures, so they wouldn't have to remap/design lights themselves.

Lighting Program: The computer platform would give you, as the "light architect", total freedom to set the mood of your room. Your mood could be static, animated or responsive to its environment. Static moods don't necessarily mean boring: you could differentially color a room and come up with cool patterns that play well to the furniture and other surroundings there. An animated room could be simple or complex. The complexity could be stepped up another level through the use of "Short Throw Wide-Angle Opaque Glass" as I will describe later below. A rolling or pulsating pattern might look pretty cool. As would many "screensaver"-like options.

Transferring to Controller: After the lights have been mapped, the program written, its time to transfer it to the device that will control the actual bulbs. The technology used to send the control signals will dictate some of the aspects of the controller. If a wireless standard like ZigBee is used, the controller could be anything from a handheld remote to your laptop with a ZigBee USB fob sitting on the side of it. If HomePlug is used instead, the controller would have to be connected in some fashion to the same circuit as the LED lights that you were looking to control.

Running the Program: Running the program could be a matter pressing play on your laptop (perhaps the animation is tied into the iTunes visualizer on the music that you are stream through your house for your party). Alternately, it could be pressing button 1 on your handheld remote when you walk in the door and the room begins pulsating in the very cool way that you've spent hours programming.

"Short Throw Wide-Angle Opaque Glass"
OK, so the LED bulbs cost about $150 each. That's a lot of money! I have a room in my basement with 15 recessed lights. Even if I'm a bit crazy and I spend $2,250 to put LED bulbs in each of those lights, I am probably not going to add another couple hundred lights to make a contiguous "canvas" for me to develop some really, really cool lighting program.

Instead, what I propose to do is to mount a 2' x 2' piece of opaque glass below each recessed light that will spread the light from the LED out about 10x from the "wide angle" that bulb would produce. The opaque glass would hang about 4 inches from the ceiling and would be supported by four corner fixed pegs or screws going into the drywall of the ceiling. Between the opaque glass panel and the LED bulb, there would be an innovative lens that spreads the light evenly out to the full area of the glass. I'm not quite done with ensuring that the physics work here, but I'm sure that somebody smarter than me could tackle this in a matter of no time.

The effect of adding the "Short Throw Wide-Angle Opaque Glass" is that you'd have an almost contiguous surface that you could do some really cool things with, such as display pictures and more complex graphics. Here, the orientation of the bulbs really do matter and you'd begin to talk pretty quickly about how many "pixels" each bulb could represent or display. Initial lights ought to be capable of 128 pixels and densities could be increased in the bulbs without the glass needing upgrading (as long as it was in increments of 4x).

Who Should Do This?
GE, Philips come to mind immediately. They certainly own the lighting market in the U.S.

In fact Philips appears to have the beginnings of a system in place, but unfortunately looks to be only in the press release stage. Products available today look simplistic, such as the LED Color Changing Party & Deco Bulb. Other, similarly simplistic LED light items can be found here.

Smaller companies, such as ChannelBrite might have just the right combination of innovation and business skill to make this happen, at least at a small scale.

Will it Happen?
Probably, but will it take a while. Unfortunately, politicians are fixated on compact fluorescents as being the "mandated" wave of the future. Instead of looking for more efficient outcomes, the government has decided instead it will pick technology winners. This is not a case where the government should be mandating method, only outcome (efficiency). OK, I'm off my soapbox now.