((Don’t forget, only two days before the sorta kinda Austin premier of "Dead Things" at Nueva Onda!))
Did you know that you could buy a hundred bright white LEDs on ebay for about $10 (including shipping)?
So for the past week or so, I’ve been assembling exactly 80 of those LEDs into a chandelier for my breakfast nook.
My girlfriend had no faith in me. She thought it would be a horrific eyesore, but the actual finished product won her over.
It has an amazing light quality. It’s an eerie cold glow, very diffuse and almost impossibly soft. You put your hand underneath the light and you think that you might break the illumination itself. It’s the sort of light that you would find in the land of the dead. Or Iceland. Which practically amounts to the same thing.
I was sick at home with a cold last week, so I had the time to solder 164 wires together. The LEDs are sunk into 5mm holes drilled into a sheet of lexan polycarbonate (the pricier plastic sheet one can buy from home depot). Two parallel arrays of 40 LEDs are arranged in series and powered by a one dollar goodwill DC power source. The DC converter says it’s 6v 2.1amps, but it actually clocks in at 10volts. Which is good, because even at 10v the LEDs are still a little underpowered from their factory recommended .025ma operating current. I figure that with the lexan and the glue holding them in operating as effective heatsinks they could probably survive overclocking a little, but I would just as soon underdo the current and see how many years they will last before an LED blows.
I’ve also put together a little bedside lamp from the spare pieces from the chandelier.
Not as serviceable, but cool enough.
