Friends offgrid need amber lights, and NiMH (not li-ion) -- ideas?

This one?

from the aquarium people
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2014/4/lighting_album/image014.jpg

The reef buliders give color a lot of attention. Many more spectra here: An Updated LED Guide v1.1 - Lighting Forum - Nano-Reef Community

And here’s the technology: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/view_article.cfm?gotourl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opticsinfobase.org%2FDirectPDFAccess%2FB088C13E-EFB9-FE77-F728EB1DC33BEAEE_199457%2Foe-18-11-11063.pdf%3Fda%3D1%26id%3D199457%26seq%3D0%26mobile%3Dno&org=
Full down-conversion of amber-emitting phosphor-converted light-emitting diodes with powder phosphors and a long-wave pass filter

I see a lot of nice 3xAA lights in this thread. I will refer back to it if I need others for people who don’t want to use lithium ion batteries.
Here is a long run time light: http://www.tmart.com/X2-CREE-T6-10W-1200LM-200m-Range-Aviation-Aluminum-Alloy-Flashlight-Torch-Gray_p186586.html . 3xD, $23.13. I ordered one. There are D size Eneloops. The figure given for run time is ridiculously low.

Are there any sodium lights still available or on surplus?

> 3xD at T-Mart
Nice! thank you, I’ve ordered one. (I see they’re also available for cough*$90*cough on Amazon …)

Low pressure sodium streetlights are still available — astronomers love them for good reason
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/about_NOFS/darksky/LPSnet/LPS-references.html
None small enough for household use, though.
Way too much light for places with limited battery power.
Though I wish more rural folks would choose them instead of the blue-white mercury vapor lights for outdoors (sigh)

Meanwhile, I’m succeeding with the 4/3AF NiMH cells — those are about the size of 18650s, so I can cough*recycle*cough some of my older flashlights to my friends.

So far using a DX driver SKU 7880 (out of stock at the moment) but it’s way crazy complicated:

Next going to try this: http://www.dx.com/p/ak-007-0-8-1-5v-3-mode-circuit-board-for-flashlights-11-9mm-50526

No good 3xAAs so far.
These from DX are utter crap, with 5mm leds, no drivers; resistor only.
353873 Pange RR1 LED 150lm 1-Mode White Outdoor Flashlight - Black (3 x AA) (all plastic, soft crappy plastic at that)
190082 SMALL SUM ZY-515 60lm LED White Flashlight - Black (3 x AA) (actually “Small Sun” — metal battery tube is the one salvageable part of it, all the rest is plastic)

I’ve been musing over the Tractor Supply / JobSmart 3xAA pointer, tempted — not sure how easily it can be modded to put in an amber emitter.
Certainly next time I am going through Petaluma I’ll go by and look at one, not going to do the 50 mile round trip just for that tho’
Still looking for more info online about how it’s made.
OH, right here — is a description: SOLD - Modified Jobsmart Flashlight - 3AA XM-L T4 Copper Heatsink Custom Paint

Meanwhile I’m going to drill out a couple of ancient Brinkmann 3xAAs, the “Mag’s Mods” simple method to make P60 dropins fit into them.

Just wanted to bring up the new Hugsbys, in case they didn’t pop up allready:
Don’t know about the modes, I think there is something in the 10$ flashlight reference.

1AA XP-11: Link to Ali
2AA XP-12: Link to Ali

Fasttech has them at twice the price.

I installed red led strips yesterday to compliment my amber ones i use the last hour/hours before bed, and i really really like it :slight_smile: the combination gives better contrast so it is easier to read & focus on details in low dim light.
I haven’t slept this good in a long time :slight_smile:

I also installed twilight on my android smartphone, and it works really good to dim & lower the color temperature.
In combination with f.lux on the PC & amber/red light strips i would say, i am closing in on that no disturbing green/blue light the last hours before bed, i have been craving since i learnt how bad it was for your sleep & health

I can’t express how smooth & great it feels to wake & turn of the alarm with dark adjusted eyes on a very very dim red phone screen, instead of a glaringly harsh blue screen thats way to bright even on the lowest standard setting, and then turn on the red/amber light lowly dimmed and slowly turning it up as my eyes awaken.

I used the word believe because, i asked you to test out f.lux yourself to see if it was effective for you and you never responded, making me think that you had written off the idea without even trying it. Because as i said then, the combination of f.lux & similar programs + gel filters if needed should be superior than either alone.

And it sounded like your opinion of f.lux was based on LEDMuseums comparisons, and if you have done your own test now i think you will agree with me, that the spectrum they showed can’t have been from one of the current f.lux lowest colour temperature modes. And if am right that would mean, that is not a very representative picture of how much of the blue can be eliminated with a correctly tuned f.lux.
I think most who are unsatisfied with f.lux’s blue cancelling ability have, tested an old version before the lower colour modes became available, an low contrast screen limiting the potential to block any kind of light, or set up f.lux wrong & never seen the lowest modes.
But i agree with you here hank no blue at all is of course best, but what a correctly set up f.lux does with the problem of 6500k calibrated screens goes a long way to lessen the negative impact of them.

And i just told you OLED & plasma based screens have self emissive subpixels, if the calibration tells the screen the colour mix should be totally biased towards red so the blue sub pixel is off it would be.

And displays generally don’t have white pixels, they have a Red, Green, Blue subpixel for RGB :slight_smile: There is a Sharp line of panels that have a yellow also.

Generally the higher the contrast you can find in a screen, the higher the subpixels ability to block or cancel out the colour not wanted with the colour filters, that is what the different sub pixels are in LCD displays, different colour filters similar to the gel colour filters you use.

If you want to change the bias more thoroughly than what f.lux can provide you need to change the calibration & set up a “after dark” mode like i have done.

My monitor is the Samsung 46C750 HDTV it has about 3000ANSI contrast & is one of the last high end CCFL TV’s made, after that everything turned LED backlit (or maybe one could call it sidelit ;)), it could be a reason for that it is more effective at cancelling out the blues but the contrast plays a big part also.

For example on my Android phone i run the latest Cyanogenmod 12.1, it has a new feature called LiveDisplay, it is a very basic CMS where you can turn the green & blue subpixels almost completely off, & lower the colour temperature as low as 1000K for the Android GUI, BUT because the screen i have on my phone probably don’t have more contrast than maybe ~800 i still get a slight blue glare from the screen if i look at it from distance.

If it would have had a much higher contrast or max light blocking ability (that is what contrast in essence is) or been a OLED screen with almost unlimited contrast because it is self emmisive, it wouldn’t have that blue leak even when it is calibrated bias mostly to red. But even so it is much nicer than nothing to be able to tune the colours on for a night mode than nothing :slight_smile:

If you want to tune the colour bias more to your liking you need to learn how to calibrate your displays, but this is tricky more so on monitors than HDTV’s, because cheaper monitors usually don’t have
inbuilt calibration controls like a CMS or a 10 point white point control like most better HDTV’s have.
Check out avsforums Display Calibration to start with for example, if you want to learn how to calibrate your displays.

With lots of useful information. Cajampa, thanks for leading me here, and Hank I hope you succeed with your farm project.

Side benefits of your thoughtful discussions, so far, for me:

1. I no longer feel crazy/guilty for stockpiling incandescent bulbs for my (farm) home.

2. New appreciation for eye/brain/light spectrum issues, which I intend to research much further now.

Cheers!

I’ve tried both old and new f.lux with the MacBook monitor, basically to check and see what the spectrometer detects — but the screen hasn’t been bright enough for the little $40 kit spectrometer to say much, the result comes out like this:

You can see the bump at the 450nm end; intensity isn’t useful at those light levels though.

The spectrometer software was pretty flaky for a while and is being rewritten now, and I’ve taken the spectrometer apart to build their v3 kit. More news when I have any

Good stuff on ledmuseum. He evaluated the Asus brand of monitor I use (with f.lux.) But I notice the dates are from a while back. (I wish more stuff on the internet was timestamped or dated.)

When I was shopping for my monitor I found this in a review. Quote:

You may notice in the specs [of the Asus monitor being reviewed] a type of backlight we haven’t covered here before: GB-r-LED. The vast majority of LED screens use white LEDs (W-LED) on the top and bottom edges of the panel. A white LED emits blue light through a yellow phosphor, which neutralizes its color temp to around 6500 Kelvin. This is very easy and cheap to implement, and that’s why it’s so common. At the other end of the spectrum, we have RGB-LED which is literally red, green, and blue LEDs arrayed directly behind the LCD panel. This is very expensive and difficult to manufacture, and therefore quite rare.

The compromise is found in GB-r-LED technology. Here, the backlight consists of green and blue diodes coated with a red phosphor. The net effect is that the spectral peaks of the three primary colors are pretty much even. With W-LED, the spectral peak is much higher for blue. So, software (and the panel’s color filters) must intervene to achieve the correct color balance. A GB-r-LED panel is more accurate natively, making software and the color filter layer less critical. And you get the added benefit of the wider Adobe RGB gamut. It is a bit more expensive to manufacture than W-LED, but less so than RGB-LED.

Source: Asus ProArt PQ279Q Monitor Review: 27-Inch, Wide-Gamut, QHD | Tom's Hardware

The question is “what does the f.lux software actually do to control these leds?” At any rate, it’s pretty amusing to be on the computer at sunset. The f.lux kicks in, then the monitor seems to compensate, so the screen gradually shifts to deep yellowish-orange, then it comes back to a nice restful hue (to my eyes.) At least the software marks the passage of time by letting me know when sunset arrives.

It’s hard to find out exactly what wavelength is emitted — the key seems to be blocking or omitting 470 to 525nm, which is up to the middle of the green range roughly — per http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/jc.2004-2062

(that’s from http://www.sleepinthedark.com/540nm.html — I find new websites every time I search on these questions, but most seem to link back to the same research)

This one does a good job of distinguishing color temperature (what we see) from emitted spectra. That’s where it’s hard to find out exactly what wavelength is being produced. It’s much easier to get color temperature information — but that often enough obscures the question what wavelengths are going into producing that color temperature.

I have some friends who’d been doing fine with amber LEDs, for a few years — then someone got them a nice buttery yellow “warm white” LED and they’ve been using that for more than a year. And their sleep fell apart, one of them ended up on sleeping pills. They simply failed to realize that their “warm white” color temperature still had a blue-green emission spike. I got them back to pure amber light sources — 590nm emitters — and, lo, problem solved. Again.

Duh.

I’d like to do more with color-mixing flashlights just to make this sort of thing easier to explain.

The “color temperature” section at that http://www.sleepinthedark.com/540nm.html page — page down a few to get to it — shows four different spectra that are all perceived as “white light” as an example of color mixing.

It’s not intuitive how this stuff works just for color vision. Throw in the newly discovered receptor for blue-green that controls sleep, and it’s way strange.

Thanks
Interesting, did you use the 1200K setting for this measurment in f-lux?

I found a review of your screen @ Anandtech and it has an ANSI contrast of 796, a black level of 0.42 & a stock white level of 6704K.

This explains a lot or should i say most of the differences, with how we perceive the effectiveness of just using altered gamma ramps (like we do when we use a program like f.lux or Redshift).

My monitor (HDTV) Samsung 46C750 has a ANSI contrast of 3000-4000 depending on how high i set the backlight setting, and a black level of 0.03 cd/m2 & a white level of 6500K.

This means my monitor is 14 times better at blocking the backlight with a gamma ramp, to very warm like 1000-1200K with Redshift or f.lux, or a red & warm bias calibration from the 6500K normal white point if i want.

It is all in the black level or maximum contrast that the display can provide, that limit how effective it is at blocking different frequencies of light.

MG, your monitor has a contrast of ~1000 & if you lower the backlight setting it can get as black as 0.0861, that is pretty good for an IPS monitor, the nice thing about IPS monitors is they have the same contrast, or light blocking ability from all angels you view them from, my VA type HDTV has only the highest level when looked at straight on, as soon as you look at it from the sides it losses contrast, and most likely spills some of that blue light out in to the room.

@MG, you ask “what does the f.lux software actually do to control these leds?” And the thing is that f.lux doesn’t do anything to the leds or the backlight in a LCD display, the colour control in a LCD display comes from the colour filters in the red, green & blue sub pixels And how open or close those sub pixels are.
And the higher ability to close or open & let through light or not let through light, is what gives the perceived or measured contrast or light blocking ability in a LCD display.

And you say that “then the monitor seems to compensate” when f.lux kicks in. I think it is your eyes that compensates, i have used f.lux for years now, and recently added on in house lightning with the same effect.
And my experience is that the more you use it, the more the eyes get use to seeing the warmer colours & it almost look like it use to, at first it looked very very red, & without room lightning in a similar colour i never used the warmest setting, but with all lights the same colour, it doesn’t interfere with perceived contrast for me & i can read just as fast in 1200K as in 6500K.

Did you consider modding Thorfire TG06? Those work with a single AA NiMh and also start on low every time.

Thorfire 06
Hadn’t noticed that one but I’ll remember to watch the review thread on it.
Thanks.

Fasttech is now assuring me they’re selling an amber SK68 clone,
SKU 2139702
for real, yes, this time. But they’re wrong, still, again.

The description is:
Light Source Color Yellow
Light Source Model XP-G
Lumens (Max) 100 LM
Wavelength 590 nm

They still don’t know what they’re selling, near as I can tell.
I’ve swapped a lot of email trying to get this figured out.

Aside — here’s an illustration of how wavelengths combine to make color temperature:

That’s a red emitter and a green emitter — and when those are combined the color temperature is yellow.
But this light, while the combination result looks yellow, still has no yellow emitter in it — only a green emitter and a red emitter.

That’s how “warm white” lights can still contain the blue-green wavelengths that mess up sleep, while they look nice and yellowish.

That is good way to demonstrate how it works & why people we care about need to consider these light spectrum issues.

With more & more led lightning being installed to save on electricity, the pharma industry :evil: can look forward to selling a lot more sleeping medicines :Sp in the near future :weary: :frowning:

Thanks again for the useful commentary. More food for thought and further reading. Like many things, simple answers are insufficient. It gets complicated just below the surface. Cajampa, I am now pretty sure you are right about “eyes that compensate.”