I tried making artificial sunlight at home

there are companies that can do custom phosphor formulations for you to target a specific output. The minimum order quantities don’t make it practical for DIY but not too bad for a small startup. Our approach is to mix a bunch of different LEDs together to get the color and spectrum we want. Check out telelumen.com for an example that uses 16 chips. These are designed for researchers

Links to your e-ink desktop?

Let’s chat! Are you the article author?

Yeah - channels can be a pain, reach out to me directly if you run into issues: Jonathan @ Innerscene

Well, I think the challenge here is that they need to install the lights in all those settings to take the photo and this would be very expensive. The main purpose is to illustrate uses here, not show the final product. Maybe a disclaimer would help.

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll see if we can improve that image.

Yes! We just announced and demoed a sensor that does just this at LEDucation last week and will be shipping before the end be of the year. It’s called SkySync

Yes, there is some really interesting research on this topic. It turns out that if blue light centered around 490nm is an order of magnitude more effective at treating SAD.

https://www.innerscene.com/papers/lux-vs-wavelength-in-light...

Because we recreate the blue sky there is a lot of light in this spectrum

I also live in a sunny country (Texas). But still I have "sun tubes"[0] in my house.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=sun+tube

it is depressing, for issues see the condition Seasonal affective disorder (SAD)

The light here looks really good, but the cheaper (less nicer) alternative is just a powerful (natural) LED light - search for SAD lights

Hmm, never heard that before, I’ll have to research it more. Maybe the UV from sunlight is killing something you are allergic to. We don’t have UV for safety and energy efficiency reasons but you could try buying some strong UV lamps and see if that helps. Ideally you turn them on when you are out of the room so they don’t damage your eyes or cause cancer.

I would suggest you make sure you don't have any indoor mold. Mold in an apartment caused me problems some years ago. My understanding is that outdoor/natural mold is perfectly fine for most people (including me), but molds tend to incorporate whatever they consume into their spores, because molds prey on other molds so they try to arm themselves.

The problem is with manmade stuff like sheetrock, where the mold grows and then incorporates the binder chemicals into their spores, which are too small to see and yet get inhaled and then leech into our sinuses or whereever.

I've had problems in both work and home situations. I was tested and confirmed allergic; I don't think most people are, but it was rough for me. I'm always on the lookout for those water circles in drop ceilings; they're notorious mold colonies. Once a natural material stays wet for 12 hours, molds will begin to grow.

Just something you might be able to check off your list. Good luck.

Have you tried an air filter? A friend of mine has a bad hay fever but since he's put an air filter in his bedroom he can sleep soundly again.

I don’t think manufacturers will make LEDs with strong deep-red emission. If they made LEDs that emitted lots of red light, they probably would have a peak in the red end of the spectrum. But since they’re not monochromatic single-wavelength sources like lasers, there would be a spread of wavelengths around that red peak, including substantial infrared emission. And that IR emission makes heat, and now you’ve created an inefficient lamp, similar to the old incandescent filament lamps.

Again, another regulatory decision that makes a niche worse off overall....

Abuses of a carve-out aside, having a "Sunlight mimicking" exemption would solve this, with the added conditions that they have to actually stick to the EMF outputs of the sun to get this approval. The article itself does this with “General Wellness Lamps”.

Otherwise, the only non-reg way to solve this would be to find infrared & red LEDs and make the supplementary light sources yourself.

Yes, I saw those spectra. No, I don’t see very much energy emitted for wavelengths >700 nm.

If you look at spectra for stereotypical crappy white LEDs, they’re really no different. Everyone uses the same light emitting compounds, it seems to me.

Can't call it sun without gravitational confinement nuclear fusion either.

Or lack of flicker.

In the winter a couple incandescent lights per room is often enough to warm it up. I went out of my way this winter to "seal up" my house, and the equivalent of 2-3 bulbs per room is enough to keep them livable - with a sweater and a cap, and maybe socks. I cannot stand artificial heat, something about kt makes me physically uncomfortable, and i just want to leave an area with artificial heat. I'm fine with fires and incadescent bulbs, though.

Tan is the other end of the spectrum (UV)

It also won't be a great disinfectant, both in literal and figurative senses of the phrase.

Have you considered taking neutrino supplements?

The nice thing about them is that they're flavour changing

Good that you get your sunborn nutrino fix even in cloudy days (and much of it even at night)

Starting points for first question: Look into i1Pro (later models of the first generation), which can be had for $200-400. Combine with some free or $99 Windows/Mac/Android software [0] [1].

Second question: It is still too hard even to find CRI for most offerings. It's pretty much a "buy, test, return the ones you don't like" situation. If independent reviewers start publishing spectrograms and making YouTube/etc videos, perhaps the industry will move forward some day.

0: https://www.argyllcms.com/doc/instruments.html#i1p2

1: https://rmimaging.com/spectrashop_brochure.pdf

A little garden spectrometer is pretty good, and around $60: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxQmaJYMOAk . And the LED supplier should give a spectrometer graph. If you can get a dual peak LED that will give a better spectrum distribution. The Amaran 200x S is one of the best.

The luxeon 2835 website that’s linked in the article has a data sheet for the LED source. Scroll down and you’ll see the spectra for various subtypes of that source.

There appear to be enough loopholes and lack of enforcement that you can still piece a solution together: https://electricalproducts.com.au/incandescent-lamps.html?p=...

He hasn't given a spectrometer graph? When you ask him for one he can't seem to be bothered by something so basic either. I don't think he would beat an array of 4 amaran 200x S lights on light output or spectrum quality beyond the dimming method.

Wow, $2000 per lamp, yeah that's pricey.

If you have a chance to chat with the staff again, I notice their marketing language says "Nearly perfect spectrum matching with daylight" - but they don't publish a Spectral Similarity Index. They only claim a (relatively low) CRI of 90+.

Edit: In other materials, they claim a very high CRI of 95+. Also the advertised wattage is sometimes 400W, other times 500W.

I have a 200W LED flood light and it was the most depressing thing to shine indoors. EVERYTHING was covered in dust and filth that you wouldn't see under normal-intensity light. It felt like things had collapsed and I was surveying the remains of someone's house.

Yep you can schedule it to get brighter/dimmer and warmer/cooler from your existing [Matter compatible] smart home system, and with HomeKit adaptive lighting you can have it follow the sun.

30,000 hours. Which amounts to 3,4 years of 24/7 operation.

I replaced my HPS/MH setup with a CMH light and used it for a few harvests. Never had any issue.

Personally, I would avoid it if possible. Even if they are of the same model, small discrepancies may cause their +12V to be slightly different. At the very least, will cause very non-uniform load distribution.

Luckily, seems the OP only needs one. The current light only uses 36W @ 12V, even if they make the new light 10x more powerful, a single 400W PSU should do the job nicely.

At that point you might be better off getting a power distributor from an old server that was already designed to operate off redundant 12V power supplies. But you wouldn't want the server PSUs themselves due to the tiny loud fans.

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My first few boards had exactly the same problem, it wasn't mentioned in any of the tutorials that I watched. All you need to do is add a fill region that encloses the whole board, and usually set it to GND.

You probably don't need to worry about EMI and EMC with DC, but if you want to make these dimmable you definitely want a ground pour "behind" any high frequency lines. You additionally don't need to worry about that if you aren't manufacturing, but it's still worth learning it the right way IMO. The sig/pwr-gnd-gnd-sig/pwr stack-up is well worth getting into the habit of (it has great EMI characteristics), and translates relatively easily to gnd-sig/pwr-sig/pwr-gnd stack-up once you've nailed down the design (which has amazing EMI characteristics).

Rick Hartley made these stack-ups popular (if he didn't outright invent them): https://youtu.be/52fxuRGifLU?si=8W1WXfJRHg3Oeep5

Thanks for the insight. Most of what I know about LEDs, and specifically the LM301 series, comes from research I did prior to setting up a small indoor grow tent several years ago. It was a "spikey spectrum" precisely that I was trying to avoid. For growing Cannabis you do want spikes at red and blue, but better LEDs also emit a wider spectrum along with the spikes and that results in a better result. Having only spikes at red and blue alone works, but not as well. The lights I ended up buying had LM301H EVO LEDs with a CRI of 80 and were designed for a 2'x2' tent. You can also get LM301H LEDs with a CRI of up to 90, though. The lights I ended up buying only cost 80 BezosBucks at the time. I don't spend BezosBucks anymore, though, due to enshittification of everything Amazon, but I digress.

While they aren't designed for growing, and to use them would be a complete waste of $8k, I bet the Arri SkyPanel S120-C SoftLight with a CRI of 95 would do a fine job for growing. You weren't kidding about them being extremely expensive.