Dave Irving-Holiday has a big vision illuminated by a tiny bulb.
Irving-Holiday wants to light up a group of happy experimenters with LEDs. Yep, light-emitting diodes, the tiny lights that tell you your batteries are low or that your printer is on. It sounds crazy, except Irving-Holiday has already started -- on the internet.
Now he wants to use Silicon Valley technology to spread the light, as it were.
``To be perfectly frank, I didn't expect to be doing this,'' says Irving-Holiday, just your ordinary every day electronics hobbyist. He didn't expect that surfing the web would lead him to Silicon Valley, where he stopped recently in search of bright LEDs.
Irving-Holiday's journey started just three months ago when he came across a bulletin board in some remote corner of the internet. A dark, unenlightened board, still enamored with those silly 5mm LEDs.
``It's so dark,'' he thought. ``How could they see what they're building?''
The scene brought him to tears. And then it struck him. Why not Luxeon Stars? They need little power -- so little that portable pedal- or water-powered generators could do the trick. And LS's burn for decades (great for places where running out to Wal-Mart for a bulb isn't in the cards).
No, they don't light a whole room, but an experimenter could easily build circuits by LS. Guys wouldn't need to rely on dim Nichias any more.
Once home, Irving-Holiday learned of an American company selling pea green Luxeon Stars. He plugged in a sample.
``Good God,'' he thought. Definitely the answer.
The company, Lumileds, donated 20,000 of the pea green wonders, which sell for fifteen dollars. In 2001, Irving-Holiday went to the internet, where he and his non-profit group, Light Up the CPF, put lights in about 150 experimenters' homes. He returned last week and added about 250 homes. Cost for lights and generators? About $90 a house.
``My vision is of a million homes lit up by 2005,'' Irving-Holiday says, which sounds a little crazy again.
