Thanks! The last time I was shopping for LED strips, they just weren’t bright enough to really light up a room, but it looks like that has changed. I’ll add something about this in the post.
BTW, what I was using LED strips for was “UFO lighting” around the base of my bed. The relatively dim, low CCT strips were attached around the bottom edge of my bed frame, with the LEDs pointing toward the floor. The scattered light was just enough to read by, and having the light mainly on the floor was good for not tripping over things if I had to get up in the middle of the night.
By the way, I asked about this setup on reddit. They also recommend some custom COBs, which seems to be the most powerful solution, but isn’t as practical as strips.
That’s a pretty good thread, and also reveals that there is an existing single-component solution for the scheduled dimmer potentiometer, from the aquarium sphere, which I hadn’t thought of at all. A hundred bucks is a bit more than I was hoping to see, since you still probably need one for each room, but at the very least it simplifies things for the early adopters.
I thought the strips seemed pretty attractive for people making their own setups, since they can passively cool and are already somewhat diffuse. I do think the intensity is plenty high enough (20,000lm in a 56x26cm board), but these Bridgelux COBs the fellow mentions are 10-15% as expensive per lumen as the Optisolis strips, and outperform them too, at least according to their own measurements. As he says, it’s not much more complicated electrically to set them up, but you do have to fasten them to a heatsink with thermal paste, and possibly mount a reflector, which makes things somewhat more tedious. Overall though, even with the expensive controller, a 20000lm device is probably still coming in under 200 USD for materials (not including however you mount it in the space), which is pretty similar to what you get out of the Hue bulbs.
Yeah, that’s useful. Agree on the assessment, I want to give it a shot with one of those Bridgelux Vesta Thrive thing, it sounds like a good hobby project I would like to try. If that happens, I would do a post about it here.
Thanks! The last time I was shopping for LED strips, they just weren’t bright enough to really light up a room, but it looks like that has changed. I’ll add something about this in the post.
BTW, what I was using LED strips for was “UFO lighting” around the base of my bed. The relatively dim, low CCT strips were attached around the bottom edge of my bed frame, with the LEDs pointing toward the floor. The scattered light was just enough to read by, and having the light mainly on the floor was good for not tripping over things if I had to get up in the middle of the night.
By the way, I asked about this setup on reddit. They also recommend some custom COBs, which seems to be the most powerful solution, but isn’t as practical as strips.
That’s a pretty good thread, and also reveals that there is an existing single-component solution for the scheduled dimmer potentiometer, from the aquarium sphere, which I hadn’t thought of at all. A hundred bucks is a bit more than I was hoping to see, since you still probably need one for each room, but at the very least it simplifies things for the early adopters.
I thought the strips seemed pretty attractive for people making their own setups, since they can passively cool and are already somewhat diffuse. I do think the intensity is plenty high enough (20,000lm in a 56x26cm board), but these Bridgelux COBs the fellow mentions are 10-15% as expensive per lumen as the Optisolis strips, and outperform them too, at least according to their own measurements. As he says, it’s not much more complicated electrically to set them up, but you do have to fasten them to a heatsink with thermal paste, and possibly mount a reflector, which makes things somewhat more tedious. Overall though, even with the expensive controller, a 20000lm device is probably still coming in under 200 USD for materials (not including however you mount it in the space), which is pretty similar to what you get out of the Hue bulbs.
Yeah, that’s useful. Agree on the assessment, I want to give it a shot with one of those Bridgelux Vesta Thrive thing, it sounds like a good hobby project I would like to try. If that happens, I would do a post about it here.