http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI&feature=youtu.be

Finally, I have a copy of the video from the filming session done at the end of last year. Sorry that took so long to acquire!

It was great getting to watch (albeit remotely) the filming session.
Got any questions?

Trying to figure out a way to go modular. I think the company I'm working with has a piece that I could modify into a modular plug and play system for my horticultural panels, so I can simply warranty repair with a swap out. It is going to take a fair amount of modification, however.

http://i.imgur.com/kGmNh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/tY6C5.jpg

Can't show much more than that, unfortunately.

Looks like my tech is gaining some attention - the BBC's program "CountryFile" will be at the UK facilities for filming Monday.

This should be rather interesting. Shame I'm here in the USA - I guess I'll have to settle for a mere mention on the program instead of being physically present to explain things.

So my side porn shop job has these LED-lit display cases for Lelo vibrators. Of course, being an LED nut, I pay more attention to those cases than I really should.

That paid off. A couple of weeks ago, I had noticed issues with the display cases flickering on occasion. Yesterday, I could smell electronics burning, and my first instinct was to go check the Lelo Displays and their wall-wart power supplies.

At first touch, I got burned. So I kicked the warts out of the wall plug, waited a few minutes, and opened up the transformer housing.

This is what I saw.

The entire output side of the boards (bottom of the picture) are totally fucked. Resistors burned to a white ash, diodes burned black, capacitors bulged, transformer wrapping coming unglued from the heat.

Now, the design of the circuit is just fine, and the components appear to be quality. The major flaw I see is that this is 12V 1A being pushed down 20 feet of thin thin copper wire (WITH insulation, the wires are about 1mm thick.) DC hates being pushed any considerable distance (exception being HVDC) and this leads me to believe these power supplies were inadequately tested. We tried powering 6 meters of LED strips on DC back at the research facility in the UK, we measured 23.6V input at the beginning of the chain and 10V at the end, causing huge resistive losses and making heat sinks almost intolerably hot to touch. Lesson learned, don't drive DC power down any long length of wire, especially low voltage DC. I believe this is what caused the failure in these power supplies, and the fact that the failures are in the same area (on the DC output side of the board, essentially) would give extra strength to my theory.

That porn store should be happy they have me. I just saved them from a potentially expensive fire.

Where other major companies have failed, I have succeeded. I have pumped 300w of LED power into a package that is 30mm x 30mm before actual packaging material/power leads are concerned, and kept it cool with a copper-cored carbon-coated heat sink. I am about to push the current envelope 5x past what China thinks is possible according to my inquiries to major manufacturing companies.

Here's a photo of the original 100w prototype, modified from an RGB module.

Everything is about to experience a severe system shock, from HID to plasma to fluorescent. This much power, in such a small space, and cooled easily via air cooling with an advanced heat sink not using phase changing tech or peltier cooling, is a game changer.

Questions? Criticisms? Comments?

Current trials of a moving LED system to reduce the number of lights and power we require are going very well. Now, to design a single-light instead of a double light version, to try to cut power consumption down even further. I think I am going to work with a roving and rotating wedge design. This should allow for multiple angles of coverage and exposure across every plant. I will have to come up with a spirograph-inspired movement pattern, however, to make this workable.

Droop on the blue side of the LED equation really needs to be solved. I am tired of being unable to run these things at full power.

So now not only am I a research director, light designer, and consultant in the horticultural field, I am now a porn store clerk.

I needed the extra money. Stupid R&D eats up so much profit.

Well, had City of Riverside come by to inspect the house I'm renting. As suspected, it's worse than the landlord let on, and this house does not meet the minimum Implied Warranty of Habitability. Also, the house is in pre-foreclosure, which means he's not been using our money to pay the mortgage as he stated in e-mails, which puts me in the position of needing to find a new place, soon.

Time to call up Fair Housing, find a lawyer, and withhold rent, and maybe see if I can't squat on this place via court order.

Well, I've made incredible progress with LED. 19 days from dry seed and at a full crop, with all of the characteristics and content of sun-grown lettuce. The sun-grown lettuce takes 17 days, however that is in the summer, winter takes almost 90 days in our test solar area. This will be incredibly useful for winter production.

Now I've uncovered something a bit more dastardly in the same field and it's disturbing because I got victimized by it as well, though I've been lucky enough to not incur any damages of any sorts.

It turns out that almost every LED panel out there is nowhere NEAR pulling it's rated power. This presents several problems. The first one is pretty simple - when you advertise a lamp of any sorts to be of a certain wattage, you are promising that plus or minus a small amount, your light is consuming that much power per hour. If you have a 120w LED panel and it is only drawing 60wH, you are NOT getting what is advertised. If an advertised-as-50w panel is drawing 45wH (10% less than advertised) that is an acceptable deviation. If that advertised-as-50w panel is only drawing 25wH (50% less than advertised) that is NOT an acceptable deviation.

The second problem is just as bad, you're not delivering maximum photon flux to the plants, thus you will likely never get your advertised results.

I've found that many of my own panels are having this same problem. Certain lines (specifically my older ones) stay in specified tolerances, others are simply so far out as to be unbelievable. All of my 15w and 50w panels are well within tolerance. Everything else after that, it's a crapshoot.

In the sheds, my LED bars are pulling exactly what they should pull, thank goodness, although it would be neat to be able to say that I'm using even less power than anticipated and still competing with solar-grown crops.

This is actually a huge story I'm sitting on involving this fraud. China appears to regularly do this, and as a result many consumers are being taken for a ride while some of the more aware resellers continue to perpetuate lies to keep the product flow going. I've seen it already - "240w panel only draws 120w due to line purity."

It's very widespread. Am I the only one with a conscience? How do I handle this? I've contacted the Department of Commerce, I guess I should also contact the local or state DA. Any other people I should contact?

I'll be doing a quick run out to the UK in just a couple of days to examine and test the new prototype bar I specified for my parent company and their NFT systems. Remote testing so far isn't giving me much of the information I require (primarily because the numbers are near-meaningless to anyone but myself, and I'm not getting all of the numbers I need from the people I'm asking to collect the data.) I am hoping these OSRAM Platinum Dragon diodes are going to do the job. I don't like underdriving 3w diodes to 1w but this might be the easiest thing to do for thermal management. We shall see.

This should prove to be an interesting, informative, and entertaining trip, provided my current head cold is dismissed by the time I must travel out there.

Oh boy, the TSA is going to love me and my metal leg!

Customers are coming to me, understandably quite disappointed in prior purchases of equipment.

I've been noticing a very disturbing trend recently as more and more come to me - it seems advertisers are selling panels saying "1200watt panel, uses only 540 watts!" and these people are expecting 1200w of LED performance.

This isn't good for them, nor is it good for me. I'd love to help them out but I'm not entirely sure how. The best advice I can give so far is to tell them to return it if within the return period, or else try to resell the panel to recoup their losses.

How else am I to help them? I don't want to say 'lawyer up' though I have the feeling that's going to have to be their next step for a resolution to this dishonest advertising.

I want to conduct an experiment but I need to find proper CCFL tubes. They need to hit certain peak wavelengths. So far the only directly targeted one of four wavelengths I need that I have found is an Actinic CCFL. That handles 420nm, now I need something for 460, 630, and 660.

Hopefully they're all the same 3.6W tube at 300mm.

This might lead to something not as long-lived as the LED bulb but I won't need to worry about heat-induced failure, nor cooling. I'm not trying for massive plants, this will be more for multi-stack NFT systems.

Well, with my business gaining much more interest, I've been receiving e-mails from Chinese LED makers. Almost every single one of them is totally full of themselves.

I've had to devise a simple test to determine whether or not they're worth talking to.

All I need are three things. If they know anything about my business, then they know I'm quite prepared to test out their claims in response to these three requirements:

1. Wavelengths suitable for my business
2. Viewing Angles
3. Diode Efficiency

I have received some hilarious claims, especially in the efficiency department. 1w diode with 92% efficiency? Really? That would make for almost 630 lux/w. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Cree has the lead with 200+ lux/w.

This should make for some excellent fodder for sites exposing fraudulent manufacturers.

So, apparently my account has been accessed from KUWAIT (despite a 10-character 'STRONG' password) and a bunch of information was accessed.

So I go to change my password. Apparently, Google doesn't have the common fucking sense to make password changing one of the first options under "SETTINGS."

Despite this being common sense, i had to go through three more layers of shit just to change my password.

Seriously, Google? You've lost it. Totally. Too many Chiefs, not enough Indians, and nobody there has any damned sense, despite having an education vastly superior to mine.