What Is Most Important for SSL?

A think piece by Jan Kemeling, chief sales and marketing officer at Ledzworld, served its purpose for me -- it got me thinking.

Ledzworld prides itself on making LED lamps that have maximal compatibility with the legacy infrastructure of fixtures, transformers, and dimmers present in the built environment. Kemeling, unsurprisingly, argues in his piece that compatibility is the top priority around which the LED industry needs to rally right now. (Guess who would be the logical candidate to lead the charge?)

Let's take a look at Kemeling's argument in some detail. He begins by positing that solid-state lighting (SSL) -- only the fourth great technology wave to occur in the history of artificial light -- cannot live up to its undeniable potential unless it works. So far, so tautological. Kemeling defines "works" as "achieving what it promises" as judged by end users, specifiers, designers, utilities, and regulatory agencies. He contends that there often is no guarantee that LED-based lighting will work by this standard. "Sometimes that fixture works with the LED bulb's mechanical, electric, and thermal requirements; sometimes it doesn't; and sometimes there are mixed results. The effect? Consumer uncertainty."

I believe he is right, by the way.

"Any new technology only has a small window to prove its value," Kemeling wrote. "Second chances with first impressions do not exist." Most of the industry agrees with him, as evidenced by the acute awareness of the market bellyflop that CFLs executed and the sharp desire not to repeat it.

Ledzworld's CMO goes on to break down the compatibility problem into electrical, mechanical, and thermal components and to reiterate his insistence on the primacy of the compatibility issue for the entire SSL industry.

Deep breath now

Ledzworld's interest in sharpening the focus on compatibility is evident. But is that actually the most pressing priority the industry faces? The poll over there on the right asks us to consider what is most important.

• Education: We need to bring both the industry and consumers along (don't we?) so that CCT, CRI, and spectral composition don't result in so many glazed eyes.


• Energy efficiency: It's the main selling point for SSL (isn't it?) and we need to continue pushing onward toward the maximum efficacy physically possible.


• Better color rendering: We have been impoverished for decades (haven't we?) by the lousy color rendering of fluorescent and sodium vapor. LEDs can do a far better job of this, and they must.


• Lower cost: Nobody will adopt SSL en masse (will they?) as long as its price is a nontrivial multiple of that of legacy solutions.

These are all important issues, and certainly compatibility is, too. Let us know what you consider most crucial -- in the comments below and in the poll.

Kemeling's piece ran on KiwiLighting.com (as linked above) and was picked up by LEDinside.com, where I found it.

— Keith Dawson , Editor-in-Chief, All LED Lighting

The Ugliest LED Light Bulb

The developers of the nanoleaf are making big claims for their 10-sided Frankenbulb.

LED lighting for the home has been understated, discrete. The kitchen task lights do their work without attention. Replacement bulbs are becoming reassuringly like the incandescent bulbs that used to illumine your mother's knitting.

And then comes the nanoleaf, bringing us Edison's elegance by way of Bizarro World. (The bulb's name is spelled sometimes lowercase, sometimes camelcase -- NanoLeaf -- on the website; we're going with lowercase.)

The nanoleaf is seriously ugly.

It also claims to be the world's most efficient light bulb.

It is rated at 150 lumens per watt for its top-of-the-line 1800-lm bulb (equivalent to a 110W incandescent). The company offers two other A19 bulbs, 1200 lm (~75W) and 1600 lm (~100W), that claim 120 lm/W and 133 lm/W respectively. (The bulbs are not dimmable and have a CRI of 70.)

Ugly isn't cheap. On Amazon, they start at $31.25 each in a four-pack of the 1200-lm bulbs and continue upward to $83.75 for the 1800-lm model.

The bulbs will start shipping in volume in March next year. There's a story behind that.

The history

Nanoleaf the company started in 2012 by a trio of University of Toronto graduates.

(From the Trademark-as-Spaghetti Dept., the bulb was called the NanoLight when first introduced on Kickstarter; it is made by Nanoleaf, not by NanoLight Technologies. The trademark of that latter company is NANOLIGHT, referring to a device that uses bioluminescence and chemoluminescence in laboratory testing. It is being contested by Promega Corporation.

Nanoleaf didn't hold a trademark for its LED bulb when it was called NanoLight. The name Nanoleaf, however, has a trademark pending by way of NanoGrid, a Hong Kong-based company owned by the trio that runs Nanoleaf.

Let us not even begin to discuss the patent scene.

Nanoleaf launched its Kickstarter campaign in January 2013, reaching its $20,000 goal in three days and eventually raising $270,000. With that kind of support, it's clear that they were onto something.

The company is not revealing a lot of detail about their LED sources, only to say that much of the product is custom-built to their specifications and that its components are not available for off-the-shelf. In April 2014, they featured their manufacturing process in a video, complete with a ukulele music track.

Unfortunately, the outcome wasn't as happy as the video. Early customers were returning bulbs that had failed.

Transparency

In an October blog post, the company disclosed, with refreshing candor, what was going wrong. An air void inside the bulbs was causing the gold wire that connected the LED die to the housing to bend and eventually fail. They had to scrap 150,000 LEDs and hundreds of bulbs that were planned for shipment.

A 2012 video, in preparation for their Kickstarter campaign, outlines the design principles of what was then called the NanoLight, including the printed circuit boards that make up the outer shell and host the internal circuitry. The coating and shape of the bulb improve heat dissipation, and no other heat sink is needed. As a result, the bulb is cool to the touch and can be used in an enclosed lamp.

Initially they chose a 4000K neutral white light. A short while into the production run, however, they realized that backers and customers would prefer a warmer light, particularly in the bedroom. All of the current products are listed as 3500K "warm white" -- though some might contest how "warm" that CCT is.

The bulb is rated at 30,000 hours. (As we've discussed several times in these forums, those are estimates based on extrapolation. The company hasn't been around long enough to have a production unit shining for the requisite 3.5 years needed to verify the claim.)

The nanoleaf has attracted a lot of favorable press, owing in large part to the founders' openness about their product and processes. We're not going to see this on the Walmart shelves anytime soon. That's not their goal. Nanoleaf is producing a product with an innovative design in the public arena for people who don't mind spending extra on stuff that's green and weird.

Nichia Adds Patents and Defendants in Patent Infringement Lawsuit against Everlight in the U.S.

On November 22, 2013, Nichia Corporation (“Nichia”) filed an amended complaint in its on-going patent infringement lawsuit against Taiwanese LED manufacturer Everlight Electronics Co., Ltd. and Everlight’s U.S. subsidiary Everlight Americas, Inc. (collectively “Everlight”), originally filed on September 11, 2013, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

In addition to its original claim regarding Everlight’s infringement of Nichia’s U.S. Patent No. 7,432,589, Nichia’s amended complaint includes claims regarding Everlight’s infringement of three other U.S. Patents: No. 7,462,870, No. 7,521,863, and No. 8,530,250. Nichia also named two new defendants in its infringement claim under U.S. Patent No. 8,530,250: Zenaro Lighting, Inc. (“Zenaro”), which is a U.S. subsidiary of Everlight Electronics Co., Ltd., and Zitroz LLC, which is a U.S. distributor of Zenaro’s products.

Nichia seeks to protect its patents and other intellectual property rights and takes action against infringers in any country where appropriate and necessary.

This November at IFTTT we’re thankful for…

Top Chefs on IFTTT! A cornucopia of Channel updates, including Google Glass, and Facebook Groups. Plus, Recipes for the smart shopper. Top Chefs Recipes by Top Chefs have been used more over the last 30 days than anyone else’s. Along with Top Chefs, we introduced profiles — two new ways to build your presence on IFTTT! A Cornucopia of Channel Updates Welcome Facebook Groups, reddit, Google Glass, and the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch Channels to IFTTT. New UP by Jawbone Triggers work in real-time with the UP24 band. Also, iOS Recipes got a lot more powerful. Now you can add photos directly to your iPhone albums and create new to-do's in Reminders! Recipes for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond We collected Recipes to keep your Holiday shopping informed, organized, and affordable. Read the latest Story on our blog and try them out! Gobble gobble, —The IFTTT Team Share on Facebook  |  Share on Twitter  |  Share on Google+ This newsletter was automatically sent to yangquebec.4led@blogger.com because you signed up for IFTTT with that address. To disable this communication, you can manage your email settings or unsubscribe from the IFTTT Newsletter.   IFTTT · 923 Market Street #400 · San Francisco, CA 94103

No Lights Like LEDs for the Holidays

Though strings of Christmas lights got a pass in the EISA legislation, LEDs have already captured 20% of that market, far above their penetration in general lighting.

LED holiday lights have been sold in the US since at least 2007. Early on, most were red, blue, or other colors; white was still problematical, tending toward the cool and the blue. Today, strings of 50 lights in warm white are easy to come by, and cost only a small premium over incandescents.

Certainly the majority, perhaps the preponderance, of holiday lights available here are made in China. Here's one data point: A friend bought a string of multicolor LED lights from Lowe's four years ago. They were GE-branded. Figures 1 and 2 show a label and detail from one side of the plug, displaying a model number, YL-L2K-24B. Feeding that number into Google and clicking on the first hit (the others look unrelated) returns an error, but the cached result from that search (Figure 3) indicates that the source of the GE product was a Taiwanese factory.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Cost

The Kansas City Star reported that this year, Walmart is devoting one-half of its holiday light shelf space to LEDs, and that Costco is selling no incandescent strings at all this year. The head of engineering and technology for the American Lighting Association noted at a trade show earlier this year that essentially all the holiday lights being presented to retailers were LEDs.

The reason why the tide has turned on holiday LEDs is easy to see. Their price is in the vicinity of that for incandescents, or in some cases even lower. Google Shopping turns up these prices now online: for a no-name string of 50 warm white lights, $15. For multicolor lights apparently from the same source, $13. For a string of incandescents, $8.98.

Another friend bought two strings of warm white LEDs at Costco last year for between $8.00 and $10.00 per string. Strings of incandescents were $15.00 at that time, he reported.

Turn 'em in

Since at least 2008, HolidayLEDs.com has run a Christmas light recycling program -- here is this year's. People can send in old strings of incandescents, functional or not, and receive a discount on equivalent LEDs. HolidayLEDs.com separates and recycles the old strings. This year, Home Depot offered a similar turn-in program at its stores nationwide (it ended on November 17).

Sales of LED lights were up 50% last year at a Kansas light bulb store, KansasCity.com reported, and the prognosis for this year is more of the same. Penetration of holiday LEDs is in the low double digits, compared to perhaps 1% for general LED lighting in the residential market, and a few percent commercially. Within a very few years, incandescent holiday lights, first demonstrated by Thomas Edison himself in 1880, may have gone the way of the dodo.

— Keith Dawson , Editor-in-Chief, All LED Lighting

The Nuances of Transient Protection

Protecting circuits against transients is easy in theory, but the details matter.

I've been spending a lot of time on the road as of late. Last week I was on a ferry to visit a customer in Connecticut. Today, as I write these words, I'm on a Jet Blue flight to Texas to visit a different customer. Since I'm spending this part of my life as a transient, I thought that transient protection would be an excellent topic to discuss.

Voltage and current transients are a risk in practically all electronic devices that operate from a distributed power system. LED lights are no exception. The power network in a typical home experiences many different potential sources of electrical disturbance on the power lines, including:

75 Volt surge on 28 VDC bus.

• Load-induced transients (switching of high-power loading devices, e.g., electric stove)


• Inductive loads (primarily motors in applications such as AC units, refrigerators, etc.)


• Lightning-induced transients. Lightning doesn't have to strike the lines, it just has to come close to power lines to induce spikes.


• Utility-induced transients (brown-outs, line repairs, power surges, etc.)

For these reasons, it's very important to protect the electronic device, and in our case the LED light. The big benefit to LED lighting is long life. There's no point to touting this advantage if the driver circuit fails at the first transient. Given the LED's long potential life, the odds are high that it will see a transient.

Most of the electronic components inside the LED driver are low-voltage devices consisting of driver controller chips, capacitors, resistors, FETs, LEDs (of course), and other similar devices. These devices are susceptible to catastrophic damage when they are exposed to high voltages or current surges.

The protectors

Enter transient protectors such as transorbs and metal oxide varistors (MOVs). They are the simplest and most common means to protect circuits and devices. They behave similarly although they have entirely different construction.

A transorb is a semiconductor device akin to the Zener diode. The MOV is more closely related to the thermistor. Generally speaking, the transorb is more precise than an MOV, whereas the MOV can usually absorb more energy. Unlike most other electrical components, these devices are designed to absorb and dissipate lots of energy very quickly.

Transient suppressors sit across the input to the electronic assembly and act as a watchdog. They normally do nothing to the circuit. Their entire mission in life is to spring into action if, and only if, the input voltage exceeds a threshold that could damage the downstream components.

Finesse

Designing them properly into a circuit requires a little finesse. I have often seen these devices installed directly across the power input. I prefer to add a small input resistance between the transient protector and the input, especially with lower power devices. Yes, I know, adding input resistance does reduce efficiency, but it also adds a known quantity to the input impedance, and a side benefit is that it usually helps the input filter design.

The transient protector clamps the input line to the the protector's rated voltage. The input impedance limits the current to the transient protector. If there is no impedance between the transient source and the transient suppressor, the resulting current could exceed the transient suppressor's maximum current rating. You may well point out the input lines have do have some impedance -- but it's an unknown quantity. Counting on line impedance is dicey at best. It depends on the distance from the transient source.

It's very important to make sure that the transient protector clamping voltage is less than the maximum rating of the downstream components. The main part of the design is then to ensure that the transient protector can absorb the energy delivered on the input lines. It's a matter of balancing the maximum input current (the current that flows through the input resistor with the voltage of the spike at one end and the maximum voltage of the transient protector at the other) and spike duration with the energy or power rating of the transient protector.

Living Smart: LED lights for the holidays

LED lights can be a great gift to the holiday decorator. Even though they cost more than other types, they last longer, produce far less heat and use less energy. The letters stand for "light-emitting diode" (but if you're like some of my neighbors, they might more appropriately stand for "love elaborate displays.") Unlike incandescent bulbs, LEDs are solid-state. There's no filament that heats up with wasteful thermal radiation. Instead, light is released when electrical current excites electrons in the diode

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/11/21/3392704/living-smart-led-lights-for-the.html#storylink=cpy