LED Weekend

About midway through last weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that LED-based lighting was following us everywhere, and that it was significantly enhancing pretty much everything we did. In the areas that solid state lighting had not arrived yet, its presence was sorely missed (including in some headlights that got left on, necessitating a helpful jump-start from a fellow fisherman at a chilly pond; a bit lower power drain than the vintage 2003 halogens would have come in handy).

The first stunning encounter came at rock concert. It has probably been 17 or so years since we last enjoyed getting our nervous system scrambled by some serious decibels, but having worked security at a string of concerts back in college, light-duty earplugs were standard equipment for the whole family. That can take some intensity out of the event but it's an ROI tradeoff I'll stand by. The first warm-up band had some LED floodlights that were pretty much placed for the lighting needs of the band, as well as some additional white sets to shine brightly at the audience. Light where you want it, and it stands up to repeated assembly, disassembly and travel. It only makes sense.

The second warm-up added some color changing to the mix, so no surprises there. Once the headliners took the stage, there was a wow-factor that screamed "you couldn't do that kind of thing in the old days". The stage backdrop included two lower video screens, stage left and right, and a third centered above those. As we would discover soon enough, each screen was outlined with full-color LED-driven light pipes. In addition to the pipes, there were a series of display panels measuring probably 4 by 8 feet each (1.3m x 2.6m for the metric system folks) located to each side of the upper screen, as well as below it between the lower screens. Initially, they provided a lot of white light, but progressed into rhythmic color changing patterns and waves flowing across those and the video screens, and then into a variety of designs and scenes. At one point, stunning bluish-white lighting bolts angled down along the displays, including a vivid indigo corona and appropriate "flash scatter" that just looked real. The music was great, but the lighting made it a total experience. I've read about concert lighting in our own news, but this was an order of magnitude more than expected. Not simply smooth RGB, or extensions of the displays, this was nearly a show on its own. We've come a long way since the Laserium concerts first showed up at the San Francisco planetarium.

Standing in line on the way to say hello to the band and get a T-shirt autographed, the couple behind us mentioned something called the Maker's Fair being held this same weekend. "You mean God is having a party at the fairgrounds?" I asked. "Sort of, but it's Maker Faire and more of a serious geek-fest, with all kinds of inventions, stuff blowing up, guys who play with scary turbocharged firepots and other craziness that's hard to describe, but worth the price of admission," they replied. The event was making its first foray outside of the San Francisco bay area with a trip to Austin, so what the heck.

The fair was scattered around a good chunk of the county fairgrounds here, and the first invention we encountered was a 10-foot tall, LED-based color-changing interactive Buddha. Touch different places and Buddha would glow in those spots, or set off on his own course of psychedelic "invisible man" renditions. From there, we simply had to take a few steps in any direction to encounter items that simply wouldn't have existed without LEDs. Brainwave biofeedback display systems, twinkling wall art and firefly emulators. (The builder commented that he was from Washington State, and they didn't have fireflies, so he studied the twinkling patterns of a herd/flock of Japanese fireflies, programmed it into a microcontroller, mounted LED die to the end of fine wires, gave the assembly a battery and put it into a jar - instant summertime on the bedstand.) At the same stand, they were displaying a bicycle wheel that served as an LED-based display screen. All you needed to do was pedal and you generated the requisite electricity to power the LEDs and controller, which automatically adjusted things for the current rotational speed and presented both static and moving RGB images.

Nearby was the guy with an LED display cascading along his back, and overall, many of the displays were lit with small LED spotlights (again, hard to break when traveling). In the second pavilion, you could purchase your own LED Christmas tree kit (soldering iron not included). One community college teacher was demonstrating weatherproof "social statement" LEDs that were simply an LED soldered to a nearly used-up button battery and pasted to a magnet so you could signify your favorite protest in a nondestructive way using recycled materials (only in Austin, Seattle or San Francisco, one suspects. The ones that look like bombs seem to be reserved for Boston).

LEDs even made it into the 50,000 lb full-scale "Mousetrap" game. If you're not familiar with the particulars, it's a board game in which you slowly build a Rube Goldberg marble rolling machine to trigger a little mouse-catching cage to drop. In this case, the marble was a bowling ball, and the mousetrap a 4000 lb concrete block that gave a ground-shaking "whump" onto an old vacuum cleaner and an LED illuminated mouse robot (which ended up being ejected from the crushing, merely losing its battery, but not for lack of trying to be in the right place at the right time). Previous recipients of the trap included a bicycle helmet (ouch) and a washing machine.

The most interesting realization was how many of those inventions didn't merely have a solid state light source added to them, but were created because there was such a thing as an LED to invent them with. It's analogous to the fact that while accounting existed long before the PC came into being, but video gaming did not. An application was created because there was technology to invent it with. The fair was a concentrated dose of "look what we can do now" based on the fact that the LED/SSL industry had produced bright, efficient, reliable solid state light sources, apparently at a reasonable enough price for them to be everywhere in these entertaining realms.

Since we have real fireflies around the yard, all that was left that day was to go home an turn on the little "airplane on a stick" next to our bedside and watch the LEDs pulse out cosmic patterns... dreaming of the applications none of us have thought of.

Rube Goldberg Sandwich Maker
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