My buddy is a cop. He made a light that he can throw into a room which has three heads. It always lands with one head facing up to illuminate a room before he clears it.
He asked me to find out if there is a light that is made like this. What he is looking for is a light he can throw to light up a normal sized room enough that he can see if there are any people hiding. It has to be rugged enough to take the beating of being tossed onto hard floors. It should have a quick on switch so he can activate it and throw as fast as possible.
I figured this is the place to ask. I know of nothing like it.
May I interest you in the tactical balls shirt located on the middle of the page? Surely if your balls are tactical grade, you would want the entire female (or male if you roll that way) population to know about it?
I’d go with a cube or tetrahedron with LEDs on each side. You get better light coverage that way and it won’t roll. Depending upon the LED power, I’d also put an accelerometer chip in it so the bottom one does not light. A high power LED can burn things very close to the lens. I’ve scorched hardwood with just 3A into an XML when the light was put lens side down while turned on.
Tetrahedron with reflectors and LEDs on the flat faces. Would need 4 LED/reflector combos. Put in an accelerometer so the bottom LED doesn’t light. Shouldn’t roll and would always have 3 LEDs facing the room.
Or for something similar how about a weighted ball with one light on the top. the ball would only be weighted on one side so it would always stop with the weight at the bottom. That way you’d only need one LED and no accelerometer. With a bit of padding below, the batteries could even help serve as the weight.
The light ball is close to what I was thinking but they don’t look very bright. Seems like this would be easy to make. I’m thinking a CR123 or two powering it and four floody emitters in different directions like a caltrop so it always lands with one facing up.
The nice thing about a tetrahedron shape is the emitters will be facing up and outwards, lighting the room… a round ball will dump all its light on the ceiling. A cube is easier to build, but the side emitters will be illuminating your feet.
glowsticks are single use- if you are doing this room clearing thing often, it gets expensive fast.
TP, that was my first thought also. you could use an arduwini (wrong spelling, mini arduino) with an accelerometer board to easily control all the lights. depending on how big it is, you could do a little code sequence so that if you shake it twice and then throw it, it is at 50%, 3 shakes for strobe, so on so forth.
it would suck though, if you threw it into a kitchen, and it stuck to any available metal surface, not where you wanted to to stick, aka under the fridge, requiring to to holster your gun, get down to hands and knees, and retrieve it, leaving you totally available to attack during the process.
