Re: 1 watt red,green,blue luxeons used at techno p
It doesn't need to be perfect, and I will be using a dimmer for each anyway. The title of this thread, and my underwhelming experience with the CKSauce LightWasher have me in mind to build a LightWasher that really will color an entire wall.
I just wanted to get in the ballpark; if I drive 1 red LS at a full 350mA, I expect that 1 green and 1 blue at a full 350mA will not be bright enough to match it, so I'm looking for a guess as to the minimum number of greens and blues I'd need. These guys
http://www.tirsys.com/architectural/architectural_feature_lighting_pro.asp?seriesid=true&productid=1
are using red/green/blue LSs in a 1:2:2 ratio, so I may try that myself.
I'm actually building this for a friend's apartment, she wanted to paint the ceiling sky-blue and I suggested - why not get one of these nifty CKSauce things, leave the ceiling white, and use the LEDs to get the sky-blue? You could even mix it a different way for sunset, etc.... But the CKSauce gadgets are too weak to illuminate more than a couple square feet, and they certainly won't have much noticable effect in the daytime.
In contrast, I can cover my entire living room ceiling in red light using a single red LS. (Well, that's with the LS sitting on a coffee table; the beam can easily spread to cover the whole room.) I plan to mount these light clusters higher up in her place, above eye level and pointed upward so they don't blind anyone. I'm figuring one cluster of LSs in each of the 4 corners of the room should do pretty well. It won't be uniform, but that may not be too important either.
(I dunno just yet. Without actually seeing it in action, I have no idea how it'll work esthetically. Maybe it will just look tacky, maybe it will look fine.)
I'm ordering a couple miniature joysticks from CH Products. One will be a panpot to vary the overall brightness in each corner of the room. With the joystick centered I want 350mA going to all LEDs in all 4 corners, subject to the chosen color mix. I was planning to use a second joystick for a color mixer, 1 axis for 0 to full red, and 1 axis for blue to green blending.
No batteries here. This will use an AC adapter. I'll assemble the LED clusters onto a base and mount RJ45 jacks on each, and run 4-conductor phone cord back to the control unit. (red, green, blue drive, and ground. perfect, and easily installable...)
So most of the time I expect the output will be something close to sky blue. But I'd like to be able to tweak things to get white if I really wanted it.