Fluorescent Lights

TCP LT814B2CCT LED Light

Fluorescent lights in the basement are burning out. Go to Home Depot, all they have is LED replacements. Apparently you can't buy actual fluorescent bulbs in Oregon anymore. They had one there that claimed to be a Direct Replacement, so I picked up a pair for about $15. They plugged into the old fixture, no problem, and turned on, but you may as well have not bothered as they were nowhere near as bright (1800 Lumens) as the old ones (there are still some fluorescents that aren't burned out). So I go to Platt Electric Supply (which is actually closer to my house) but they don't have any fluorescents either. However, they ordered me a pair brighter LED lights (2600 Lumens) for $25. Only problem is you have to rewire the fixture to bypass the ballast.

WAGO Triple Connector

While I am waiting, I notice they have WAGO connectors on the shelf. I've heard good things about them, so I pick up a couple of small boxes, about the size of a deck of cards, thinking there will be a dozen connectors in the box and it will be five or six bucks. Then I check out and each box is like $25. That's when I notice there are like 100 connectors in each box. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I have an old yogurt tub full of wire-nuts that I could use, but you know what? Those wire-nuts, bless their little plastic hearts, are just a real pain. Something about wires, they just don't like to line up against other wires, and if they do then the ends are not aligned. If you can get them to behave, you can twist on the wire-nut and have secure connection. Usually. If the wire-nut gods are smiling on you. These little WAGO connectors cost somewhere around forty cents each but they are infinitely quicker and easier to use. I recommend getting a variety pack that has connectors for 2, 3, 4 & 5 wires. I only got 2 & 3 wire connectors, so I had to cascade them to get all the wires in the fixture connected. 

The wiring is dirt simple. You can supply power to both ends, or just to the two pins on one end. Schematic printed right on end cap.

Got the fixture wired and the lights installed, Now I get to select what color I want. Switch on the end cap has five settings:

• 3000K
• 3500K
• 4000K
• 5000K
• 6500K

I think I set mine to 5000K.

Iceland Spar: the Mineral That Changed Science

Previous posts about the solar compass.

Sunlight

Sunlight coming through the leaves

I was sitting outside during the late afternoon and I saw a spectacle. Light from the sun was shining through a hole in the leaves of the trees and it formed a starburst of a multitude of thin rays of light emanating from the center. I tried to capture it with the camera but didn't quite. If you embiggenate the image, you can kind of see some of the effect near the center, but what I was seeing extended out so far that it would have filled the whole frame. It might be the shortcomings of the camera, or it might have been a trick of the eye. In any case it was pretty cool.

The hole in the leaves must have been pretty small because I could look right at it with my unshielded eyes. I probably avoided focusing on the center, but I could see it and it didn't produce any after effects.

Raman Spectroscopy

In the Keanu Reeves movie Siberia, Keen-o uses a magic box to tell real diamonds from fake ones. The fake diamonds aren't really fake, they are just as real as the real diamonds. The difference is the fake ones were manufactured while the real ones were dug out of the ground. I think the difference the machine is looking for is the presence of nitrogen - real diamonds have it but artificial ones don't. After rooting around for a bit I found that Raman Scattering is what the magic box uses to detect the presence or absence of nitrogen.

 
Raman spectroscopy has been around for awhile:

The Raman effect was named after one of its discoverers, the Indian scientist C. V. Raman, who observed the effect in organic liquids in 1928 . . . Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for this discovery. 

In the beginning it was very difficult to observe the phenomena. Lasers have made it much more practical. Let's let YouTube show us how.


Intro to DIY Raman Spectroscopy
Applied Science

Not the smoothest exposition, but he covers all the major points.


Homemade Raman Spectrometer: Diamond
toc1955

This one is so short that you won't have time to read the text. Remember the space bar is your friend. It's here because he has some good graphs of the results.


Basics and principle of Raman Spectroscopy | Learn under 5 min | Stokes and Anti-Stokes | AI 09
Practical Ninjas

Mr. Ninja is not a native English speaker. In this case subtitles are your friend.

Lastly, if you want one of these magic boxes, you can buy one from Stellar Net though it will cost you a pretty penny.

StellarCASE-Raman - Portable Raman System for Material Identification | StellarNet, Inc.

Flashlights

Pistols with Optical Sights

Tamara Keel has a story up on Recoil where in I found this gem:

The average flashlight wasn’t all that great well into fairly recent times; Gen X’ers and older Millennials can probably remember camping trips with cheap plastic or sheet metal flashlights that held a couple of C- or D-cell batteries, were about half as bright as a dead firefly, and didn’t have enough battery life for a night of sneaking out of the tent and exploring the woods looking for a good place to tell ghost stories.

That's pretty dang dim.

LED's Part 3

LED ceiling light installed in bathroom exhaust fan

Finally solved the light problem in the master bath. Took considerable fooling to get here.

Giant LED light bulb

Found this giant LED light bulb at Home Depot. It's about three inches in diameter and six inches long. I was able to screw it into the socket in the fixture although it didn't really fit. It protruded from the housing and and so prevented the lens being installed. But it was bright enough.

Another giant LED light bulb

Then I tried this one from Amazon. I was fooled by the conventional shape which made me think it might be the size of a conventional bulb. Wrong. It was just as big as the previous one.

4 in Slim LED Color Changing Recessed Kit

This is the kit that finally solved the problem. It took some franken engineering to get it installed in the fixture, including cutting a hole in the lens, but we got it done, it works, and it is finally bright enough.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Burst Your Bubble

Popping Air Balloons With Magnifying Glass - Experiment
Mad Russian Scientist

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

LED's

Building DIY LED lights
DIY Perks

I'm looking for a way to upgrade the light in the new exhaust fan we installed in the bathroom a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I know, I should have looked for a fan that had a better light to start with. I did look, a bit, but I didn't find anything, and the fixture looked like it might be okay. Too bad, it's in now and we certainly don't want to go through that again just to get a better light. There ought to be a way, so I'm looking around and I come across this video. He has some good information about LED's.

There is an ad in the middle of the video. It starts at 6:45 and runs to 8:00. Can't say as I blame him. I doubt he is getting anywhere near the number of views that some of the more popular channels are getting.

I posted another video of his a few months ago just because it was technically cool. He used a big LED in that project as well.

Stupid LED's

CIE Standard Illuminant D65
Spectral power distribution

The future is stupid. Used to be, back in the bad old days, you could go to any grocery store and pick up a light bulb. They had a complete selection from a low of 40 watts to a high of 100 watts. The selection was complete because that was all there was. Now light bulbs have gone the way of nuts and bolts: there is a different bulb for every application. 

Chromaticity diagram by David MacAdam
also known as the CIE 1960 Color Space
D65 appears near the 8000K line
Note sure what this means, but it makes a pretty picture.

They don't just come in a different power (watts) ratings, there are different sizes, mountings, technologies, and CRI-s (Color Rendering Indexes). Remember the Wall of Diapers at Toys R Us? That's what the light bulb display at Home Depot looks like now. I spent ten minutes there the other day looking for a Halogen bulb for a work light and I could not find it. I finally had to ask someone. Took him a minute but there it was, right in the area I had been looking. Confused by the packaging I was. Must be getting old, starting to talk like Yoda I am.

Old fixture: Broan 9427P 500 Watt, 4.0 Sones, 70 CFM

We just replaced the light fixture / exhaust fan in the master bath with a new one. Nothing wrong with old one other than it was noisy. Didn't bother us when we built the house 25 years ago, but now my wife is at war with the mold growing on the ceiling (see those itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny black spots on the ceiling?) and she wants a new exhaust fan. Normally this would be a simple fix, there are a wide variety of exhaust fans available as long as you want the standard size, which is about a foot square. Ours is not, it is a fancy-schmantzy one with two flood lights so it's about a foot by fifteen inches. We could have replaced it with a standard one, but that would have meant patching the drywall which would have turned a day long project into a week long one. Effing drywall.

New Fixture: Utilitech 7123-02-L 1300W, 1.5 Sones, 80 CFM

Looked around and found one the right size that should be quieter, but it only has room for one 60 watt light bulb and it is like turning on the dark. So I got a 100 watt equivalent LED and plugged that in. Doesn't really help, it is like turning on the dim and it's still that ugly 'cool white color'. Next step might be to replace the light fixture with a pair of LED fixtures designed for mounting in the ceiling. That's going to require some chopping and hacking to make them fit and considerable finesse so it doesn't look like a hack job.

LED 100 Watt Equivalent

After we got the fixture installed we discovered that the fan wouldn't run. Seems that the old fan had an old timey motor and it worked fine with the electronic timer, but new the fan has a fancy new motor and it required a different kind of timer. The essential difference is that the old timer did not require a neutral wire connection and the new one did.

TORK In-Wall Countdown Lighting Timer

P.S. On every other exhaust fan in the world, the bezel / grill is attached with springs so all you need to do to remove it is pull it down a bit and then reach in and disconnect the springs. The bezel on the new Utilitech exhaust fan is attached with a screw, a screw that is hidden behind the light bulb. So in order to remove the grill, you must first remove the lens, the light bulb and the screw. Now that the grill is loose, you can reach up and unplug the wire to the bulb. Now it is finally free. Bah, double bah and humbug.

P.P.S. Does the heater in the new unit work? I can't tell. I could definitely tell when the heat lamp in the old fixture was on.

Airplanes

Deicing an Airbus A300 at Appleton (Wisconsin) International during a heavy wet January snow storm.Top Beacon light gives "effect".

Airliner skimming the surface of the moon

Austrian Air Force Saab J35Oe Draken

B-25 bombers fly over Mount Vesuvius in Italy while it erupts in March 1944 during the Italian Campaign of World War II. Colorised.

September 19, 1962. Plot George Aird ejects from his English Electric Lightning. Photo by Jim Mead.

ASN Aircraft accident 13-SEP-1962 English Electric Lightning F1 XG332

Whilst carrying out a demonstration flight, there was a fire in the aircraft’s reheat zone. Un-burnt fuel in the rear fuselage had been ignited by a small crack in the jet pipe and had weakened the tailplane actuator anchorage. This weakened the tailplane control system which failed with the aircraft at 100 feet on final approach.

I came these across while skimming items on feedly. Failed to note where they came from.

Polar Clock

Looking for information on Sun Stones and the Solar Compass, I came across a reference to Charles Wheatstone's Polar Clock. Wikipedia has a fine article about Wheatstone. Wheatstone is best known as the inventor of the Wheatstone Bridge, which is some kind of electrical apparatus.

Wheatstone's Polar Clock, by William H. Darker, Lambeth, c. 1848

The Polar Clock gets a paragraph of its own:

One of Wheatstone's most ingenious devices was the 'Polar clock,' exhibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1848. It is based on the fact discovered by Sir David Brewster, that the light of the sky is polarised in a plane at an angle of ninety degrees from the position of the sun. It follows that by discovering that plane of polarisation, and measuring its azimuth with respect to the north, the position of the sun, although beneath the horizon, could be determined, and the apparent solar time obtained. The clock consisted of a spyglass, having a nicol (double-image) prism for an eyepiece, and a thin plate of selenite for an object-glass. When the tube was directed to the North Pole—that is, parallel to the Earth's axis—and the prism of the eyepiece turned until no colour was seen, the angle of turning, as shown by an index moving with the prism over a graduated limb, gave the hour of day. The device is of little service in a country where watches are reliable; but it formed part of the equipment of the 1875–1876 North Polar expedition commanded by Captain Nares.

Selenite, a Gypsum crystal

Pic of the Day

DIEGO GARCIA, British Indian Ocean Territory, April 16, 2014. Ohio-class guided-missile submarine USS Georgia. U.S. Navy photo by Hank Gettys.

Something about the color in this picture does not look quite right. I don't know whether someone has mucked with it or whether that's just the way things look in Diego Garcia. Maybe being down on the equator, a thousand miles away from any other land, does something to the light.

Score

My Flashlights

I have a nice solid Mag-Lite flashlight. I've had it for years. The batteries, being batteries, are getting weak. I should replace them, but alkaline batteries are expensive. Then diligent daughter and I stumble across these little bitty flashlights at Office Depot: two for $6. They are a nice size, they use LED's so batteries should last longer, and they look like they use one C-cell. Unfortunately, when I get them home I discover that they do not use one C-cell, they use three AAA batteries. Why? Why would you make something like that? Why use three tiny, expensive batteries, when you could get by with just one battery with substantially more capacity? What the frak is wrong with people? Of course it probably doesn't make much difference. I don't use a flashlight that much, and with LED's, it will probably be years before I need to replace the batteries. Still it's the principle of the thing. Every LED circuit I have ever seen uses a resistor to drop the voltage to somewhere around one volt, presumably so the LED doesn't burn up. Here they've put in three batteries, and if they're wired in series (presumably they are. Why else would you use three batteries?) then you've bumped the voltage up to 4.5, and now you'll need a resistor to drop the voltage back down. If they had just used one C-cell they could have done away with a whole lot of crap. The light is "white". It is very different from the light I get from the Mag-Lite with it's incandescent bulb. On one hand it is very illuminating, on the other it doesn't really seem to be bright. Something about the spectrum, I suppose. It doesn't have the adjustable beam like the Mag-Lite. That adjustable beam is a mixed blessing, as there seems to be a dark spot right in the center. I suspect that is due to the uneven shape of the bulb. One problem with the Mag-Lite is that it is perfectly round and if left on a flat, tilted surface it will roll right off. My new mini-lite as small flutes around the bezel that will keep it from rolling if the surface is not too tilted. It just occurred to me that LED's are embedded in little blobs of plastic, and the plastic generally is the same color as the LED, but it wouldn't have to be. You could put any color LED in a clear plastic, and you wouldn't know what color it was until you turned it on. You might even be able to put an LED in complementary color and not get any light out at all. It may not be as cool as Tam's tactical light, but it didn't have a tactical price either. And it fits in my pocket.

Update May 2021 replaced missing picture. This one was weird. Usually when pictures disappear it's because I hot linked them from another site and the other site has changed or disappeared. But not this time. This time I uploaded it to Blogger, so I can only conclude that Blogger lost it.