The Call of the Open Sidewalk

I seem to be stuck on the low level lighting thing. An advantage to not working is not having anyone to tell me to get back to work...

Here is an approachable introduction to modern colour vision theory. It helped me a lot. The rest of the site (watercolours) is a bit too technical for me but I think I now know what to expect when I mix single colour LEDs.

For my bathroom night light I now think that just green and red LEDs would of worked fairly well. I could of balanced them to give some sort of yellow. A problem would occur if the colour was exactly the same as the perceived light colour. It would not be visible against white. The 3rd colour in between removes that ambiguity. That is assuming that the green and red LEDs do not balance out to the in between colour. The apparently excessively bright green LED is thus a feature as it moves the balance point well away from the yellow LED wavelength.

Another possible problem with just using green and red (or blue and red) is that you would end up with more green light. Green (and blue) can blind night vision when not used in moderation. I now think of my bathroom night light as primarily yellow with a bit of some other wavelengths thown in to allow some colour discrimination.

posted at: 17:13 | path: /ledlight | permanent link to this entry