For many years, we’ve had this fixture + Edison-type incandescent light tube above our front door:
And it shows… my apologies for the dirty fixture (top) and light bulb (bottom).
That’s a 120 W lamp (it’s 120 cm long!), which used to be on for several hours each evening, day in day out.
Time to move on to a better solution:
This is a standard RGB LED strip in an aluminum profile with diffuser. It draws about 15 Watt from a 12V LED supply, i.e. an immediate eight-fold improvement over the previous setup. And it didn’t cost me anything, because this unit came from my workbench, where I also switched to a different (LED-based) lighting setup.
It’s now also an excellent candidate for the new LED Node, which includes support for a PIR motion detector and an LDR light sensor. What I’d like is to have this light turn on very dimly once night falls, and then gently ramp up to full brightness when someone is actually at the door. Welcome!
Not there yet: I still need to implement the software – the Achilles’ heel of Physical Computing!
Nice! Are you selling RGB LED stripes?
Nice! I am going to build one for my place I think! :D