Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable

https://liu.se/en/news-item/nasta-generations-lysdioder-ar-billiga-och-miljovanliga

by geox • 1 year ago

172 152 1 year ago

liu.se

hulitu• 1 year ago

Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable

Sustainable ? Made from tropical forest trees ?

ForTheKidz• 1 year ago

It seems their environmental impact was defined in terms of the (environmental) cost of mining gold. "The greatest environmental gain would instead be achieved by replacing gold with copper, aluminium or nickel, while maintaining the small amount of lead needed for the LED to function optimally."

ilove_banh_mi• 1 year ago

"sustainable" was incorrectly translated from the Swedish "miljövänliga" which instead means "environmentally-friendly" ("sustainable" is "hållbar" in Swedish)

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

It's a marketing term anyway, it doesn't mean anything.

etiam• 1 year ago

I came back to say pretty much that. Since these buzzwords as used in most of society today barely mean anything at all, the writer was probably happy enough to namecheck something vaguely positive and endorsed to do with environment stuff.

It would have tickled my funny bone if they'd gone with "Green" in this case.

(Thanks nonetheless to ilove_banh_mi, for setting the record straight)

KennyBlanken4• 1 year ago

The article is about people trying to engineer electronic devices that take into account their full lifecycle?

The knee-jerk cynical "hot takes" on this site are getting really tiresome. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness. Anyone can say this sort of zero-calorie edgy nonsense

userbinator• 1 year ago

Whenever I see "sustainable" these days, I think "they must mean sustainable profit --- due to planned obsolescence".

hunter2_2• 1 year ago

It just means that you can continue indefinitely with no end in sight. End could come from financial problems, consumer preferences to help the environment, environmental regulations, supply chain issues, and all sorts of other things.

It's like the sustain pedal on a piano: nothing actively dampens the sound, so the sound will continue for quite a while longer than is typically required.

NegativeLatency3• 1 year ago

Current LEDs are pretty cheap and comparatively sustainable (to other lighting technology), but lots of LED based lighting devices ship with:

- non replaceable batteries (flashlights)

- unreliable drivers that fail before the LED does, or kill the LED by heat or excessive voltage

Happy to see people working on new LED tech but the downstream effects of selling disposable stuff has to be much worse?

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

The life of indoor LED bulbs has improved over the years. But I learned to only install them in vented fixtures.

zerocrates• 1 year ago

It's LED fixtures that I have a problem with; they're very common since it's easy to make them in various shapes and things, but when a component fails more often than not it's a "replace the whole fixture" situation.

My parents have a ceiling fan that came with an LED light, which broke. It was barely under warranty for the LED part still and the manufacturer sent out a new light module, except they've changed the fan a little over the years and the new module doesn't fit on the old fan... they ended up having to send a whole new fan.

KennyBlanken4• 1 year ago

I still have several Cree bulbs that are at least a decade old, I think more like 15 years old. None have failed.

Everyone I know who complains about LED bulbs failing, you ask them and they admit to buying the cheapest ones they could find.

y33t• 1 year ago

Heat is the real killer for LEDs. Most LEDs sold for home lighting do not have very good thermal regulation, possibly as a planned obsolesence "feature".

Liftyee• 1 year ago

Granted, there is usually a rechargeable alternative to any product using non replaceable batteries. Or one can use rechargeable AA/AAA/etc. that recoup their cost within a few charges.

For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries?? Is there any way to avoid this problem besides regulation?

NegativeLatency3• 1 year ago

There's a lot of 18650 compatible flashlights and stuff, but some of them have the battery sealed inside. I have a couple of bike lights and flashlights that have this issue and I've cracked them open to replace the batteries, but it's not a regular person thing to do.

eru6• 1 year ago

Is there any way to avoid this problem besides regulation?

Just don't buy those, if you don't like them?

For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries??

That only works as a business if your customer comes back to you. The market for these dirt cheap devices is pretty fragmented. And people are unlikely to turn into repeat customers, if the previous gadget failed them miserably.

stephen_g• 1 year ago

Yeah, for parts of my house I have renovated I put in LED fixtures with separate drivers that sit up in the roof cavity, and none of them have failed (out of about a dozen lights) in the eight years since. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the house I have some older fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs and have been through a bunch of LED replacement bulbs for them.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

Yup. The LED diodes themselves will last for decades if treated properly, the power electronics though are very often made with extreme cut corners and the thermal design is awful meaning bulbs much more expensive and environmentally impacting than a bit of glass and milligrams of tungsten wire are failing in similar time spans. Somebody should do an environmental impact study of shitty LED bulbs vs incandescents to determine if the manufacturing impact difference makes up for the energy savings.

eternityforest2• 1 year ago

I don't understand why there's no startups making open source modular electronics.

A collection of maybe 50 well chosen modules could handle at least part of pretty much everything, while allowing for upgrades as tech improves.

A microwave and a dishwasher and a dryer could all use the same controller and the same display module. A desk lamp and a flashlight could use the same LED and driver.

The current modular systems are educational or hobbyist oriented, or they try to do stuff that crosses high bandwidth links and needs lots of pins, but there's not reason we can't have standard LED drivers and other simple stuff like that.

The whole range of modules would probably be pretty cheap, it's just a matter of convincing everyone to use them, which I guess is why nobody does it.

iancmceachern• 1 year ago

It's because you would need open source ICs for that, and that'd a whole complex multinational tool chain.

The modules you speak of exist, they're ICs. Most electronics now are just ICs and traces on a board. The real challenge is the IC tool chain is very complex and very not open.

It would do no good to have open source modules that are just traces and then a bunch of closed source ICs. This is what Sparkfun, adafruit, etc. do. It's great for engineers and hobbiests but it doesn't get to the root of the value you propose.

The real value is in the ICs, those are the magic modules you speak of that need to be open source.

Getting that to happen is a whole thing. Like getting ExxonMobil to share their oil rig designs.

lm284692• 1 year ago

A microwave and a dishwasher and a dryer could all use the same controller and the same display module.

The real question is do we even need displays for those? A few buttons and a knob is all we need

piokoch• 1 year ago

"I don't understand why there's no startups making open source modular electronics." There is, maybe it is not a startup per se. In Shenzhen there is 500 companies that will produce whatever you need in whatever amounts you need, could be 10, 100, 10 000 000.

jononor2• 1 year ago

Why would a startup do that? Hardware is low-margin difficult, capital intensive, long sales cycles, long rampups until revenue, volume sales are very trust-based (hard to get in when not established), expensive recalls, product compliance, etc. In addition the trend for the last 30 years of electronics is integration, completely opposite of modularization. I am very pro open source hardware and software (and contribute to both) - but I find it completely understandable that there are few startups/companies in this space.

ACCount362• 1 year ago

What's the business model?

I could, for example, design and make an open source controller board suitable for a microwave oven. But how do I sell microwave ovens competing on price with people who have been building microwave ovens for decades and have basically perfected the art?

How do I stop companies in China from taking my controller design and selling it at half the price?

mapt• 1 year ago

I'd imagine there are. In Shenzhen.

fxtentacle2• 1 year ago

"I don't understand why there's no startups making open source modular electronics."

I would love to do exactly that, but so far I have not found any way how I could do that and still have a regular salary. Of course, I could do it for free as a generous gift to Chinese factories who will then produce things and flood Amazon with it ... but they won't reciprocate and donate back to the Open Source project. The OS project will quickly stagnate and future development stops.

The fix is that the Open Source project needs to sell hardware, or else there's no revenue to fund further development. And that means you now also need FCC and CE certification. And you need patents. Or else, Chinese factories will flood Amazon with your design. (but without paying for FCC/CE)

But now that you can successfully sell hardware to fund future development and you can fend off Chinese clones, your project is not really "open" anymore. It's kind of like an OEM module that is "source available". Like the Adafruit kits that you can order from Amazon/Arrow.

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

Businesses don't care about opensource, and they already use standard electronics, just not modular, because modules are expensive.

E.g. many Haier/Candy mostly use esp32 microcontrollers, led displays don't even need modules, lcd displays use usually one of few standards, etc.

A cheap microwave costs 50euros, a washing machine 200, that's retail price with a 5year warranty, sometimes even with delivery, there is no place for modules that noone will actually use.

gosub100• 1 year ago

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but I'd like to see a product family that can be configured to replace controller boards on a wide family of appliances. For instance, a generic compressor/thermostat controller that will work as a replacement on ALL models of refrigerator for the past 20 years. It would work based on jumper settings or loops that you add/cut that would be qualified and tested for each model. It's working with power levels that could burn your house down, so safety would need to be paramount. But basically all appliances do the same thing, just at different voltage and current levels. There should be a market for a common replacement set.

mike50• 1 year ago

Dryers and microwave ovens do not require electronics. LED lamps with a wall wart that unplugs already exist.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

unreliable drivers that fail before the LED does, or kill the LED by heat or excessive voltage

That. I have a rather enclosed (little ventilation) ceiling fixture that in theory is supposed to be specced for up to 2 x 75 W incandescent. You'd think it will handle 2 x 9 or 12 W led "bulbs" just fine, right?

It killed one averagely priced led "bulb" every 2 years until i switched to a slightly more expensive brand.

xaldir• 1 year ago

There is indeed a difference between specced for "incandescent bulbs wont start a fire" and "it's warm enough to cook the electronics of your led bulbs"

pjc50• 1 year ago

- non replaceable batteries (flashlights)

Not encountered those? You people need to get onto Aliexpress where the good stuff that takes 18650 batteries is.

rob742• 1 year ago

One thing I learned the hard way is that various older relays, timers, dimmers etc. will kill LED "light bulbs", but most of the time not instantly, but over several months/years. When we bought our current apartment 10 years ago, I had the common sense to replace the dimmers with newer "LED-approved" versions, and also replaced one of two relays because it was broken, but then the remaining relay over several years destroyed several "light bulbs" and one (fortunately not very expensive) lighting fixture with non-removable LEDs, until it dawned on me that the relay was to blame. After I replaced it ~ 5 years ago, no more problems.

rockostrich• 1 year ago

I think it's a good idea in general to just try and replace every switch and outlet if you buy a home that was lived in for an extended period of time. We moved into a home that the previous family lived in for 30 years and I've been working my way through replacing everything. I've found some crazy work in some of the junction boxes. Most weren't grounded which isn't super surprising. Many were wired incorrectly which is a little less surprising.

Also it's a good exercise in making sure the electrical panel is labeled correctly. Ours was somehow only labeled like 75% correctly.

mouse_• 1 year ago

See: Bram's Law https://web.archive.org/web/20170629144859/http://www.advoga...

The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice.

In this case, as LEDs become easier and more accessable to implement, they are implemented worse in practice.

superkuh• 1 year ago

It doesn't even have to be unrelible/cheap drivers that fail. Even name brand Cree/Phillips/etc stuff have drivers that will fail rather quickly if your wall current is at all dirty.

The effect of this is LED lightbulbs that have a shorter lifetime than incandescent lightbulbs did in my apartment. At least incandescent and halogen bulbs were just a bit of glass and wire: explicitly disposable. But LED bulbs are full of parts and boards and the like and generate far more waste.

saturn86013• 1 year ago

Maybe someone can answer this question for me but I have yet to find a LED bulb that can replicate the 'full spectrum' aka sunlight feeling of a Halogen bulb. I just love the color warmth of Halogen and LED just can't seem to replicate it.

I have have bought a lot of LED bulbs in search of this. Is there something that I am missing or is LED just not capable of producing the same spectrum of color as Halogen? When I look at my items under LED and then look at them under Halogen its like the items become vivid.

The best I could find is this company called "Waveform Lighting" that sells very high CRI bulbs for like ~$20 a bulb (with the second place being Soraa bulbs) both are some of the best LED bulbs I've used but no where near the effect of Halogen. What am I doing wrong?

trox• 1 year ago

Maybe you find this interesting: https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

It's a database of light bulbs tested using a 1-meter barium sulfate integration sphere and calibrated lumen photospectrometer. Although no LED comes close to the Halogen in terms of CRI, it is very informative.

opwieurposiu• 1 year ago

Is the gold in LEDs just in the bond wires?

lightedman• 1 year ago

Occasionally the contact plating for surface mounting is also gold-plated. I can think of a couple Nichia LEDs from work that have gold plated electrical and thermal contacts.

softgrow• 1 year ago

Surprisingly or not, isn't a very new idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_light-emitting_diod...

Note that extending the lifetime is key to taking advantage of their lower base material cost. Lot of work needed there.

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

When I was fiddling with LED circuits back in the 70s (!) I experimented with turning the LED on and off with a square wave. If you turned it on and off rapidly enough, your eye did not notice it, and your eye perceived it as fully bright. (Adjusting both the frequency and duration of the "on" part.)

Hence, you could get some decent power savings doing this.

I wonder if this is commonly known. I've mentioned it to a couple EEs over the years, and they were able to reduce the power consumption of their devices.

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

I have a couple LED night lights that are triggered by a photocell to only turn on in the dark. I've often wondered if the trigger circuit consumed more power than just leaving the LED on.

nine_k• 1 year ago

It likely consumes next to no power: a proper switching MOSFET has negligible resistance when open, and has a very high gate resistance, so the photo cell does not have to produce any significant current. Possibly the current-limiting resistor in the power supply of the LED circuit dissipates more than the trigger circuit.

throitallaway• 1 year ago

PWM. This is widely used method for dimming.

hunter2_2• 1 year ago

How could the same modulation achieve "dimming" and "fully bright" simultaneously?

notfed• 1 year ago

It's also widely known to cause headaches. I swapped out all my PWM bulbs and couldn't be happier. More info here: https://flickeralliance.org/

metaphor2• 1 year ago

Perhaps less widely known is that if you market a commercial product that actually uses PWM to modulate LED intensity, you're liable to be litigated against by Philips for patent infringement?

Wild...yeah, I know. Heard that from a buddy in Austin over a decade ago. Vaguely recall that he had to redesign using some sort of current driver instead to avoid the legal encumbrance.

ioseph• 1 year ago

I thought this was very common knowledge, we used the technique in our first year EE project.

sneak• 1 year ago

Not only is this widely known, it is the main method by which multicolor RGB lights can exist, because they are actually a package with red, green, and blue LEDs in them, where each color channel is individually “dimmed” using this technique (called pulse width modulation, or PWM) to be able to produce many more colors (much like a TV or LCD/OLED display).

The white color produced by full-on of R, G, and B is quite ghastly, so modern ones come with an individual white LED (and frequently a second warm white LED) in the package for a total of four or five individual color LEDs in the single light (RGBW or RGBWW).

fc417fc8022• 1 year ago

He's not talking about dimming. He's talking about the perceived brightness when you look directly at an indicator LED.

nefarious_ends• 1 year ago

This is why I love HN! Only here you’ll find the actual guy who invented dimming!

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

I should have patented it! Mwuhahahaha

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

I watched a fascinating video of a guy explaining, in detail, how vacuum tube radios worked. Quite a joy to watch.

I'm glad I didn't take up Electrical Engineering as a major. All the fun of using signal generators and oscilloscopes is gone. Just program a Raspberry Pi to do it. or a circuit simulator on your computer. Sigh. EE is no fun without getting accidentally zapped by A/C once in a while or letting the smoke trapped in a transistor out.

It's like hotrodding a car by plugging in a laptop. Ehhh no.

saturn86013• 1 year ago

Thats more 'computer engineering' no? EE also has things like Power Systems, RF, solid state if you want to go into chip design and the like.

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

Nominative determinism strikes again! (Or is this anti-determinism?)

Saigonautica2• 1 year ago

It's widely known among EEs. It's used for lots of interesting things, such as temperature control, motor control and positioning, and LED lighting. You can do it in hardware old-style with a 555 timer or hex inverter, but most modern systems I've worked with do it with a microcontroller.

An addendum to this that you may find interesting -- I've experimented with turning the LED on for a few microseconds at higher than rated current, then off for tens of milliseconds. The average current stays far below the specifications. This results in very high apparent brightness per unit of power consumption.

Using the IV curve of the LED, this also let me eliminate the typical current-limiting resistor. The power savings are more than the power cost of the MCU that controls it (modern low-power microcontrollers are awesome).

Anyway, the end result is a little LED + CR2032 cell + magnet that you stick to furniture, and it runs for about 3 years. I made it so that elderly people I know who wake up at night to go to the bathroom don't bump into furniture (especially in an unfamiliar place, like while traveling). Without creating a thing they have to think about often. If you're curious, I posted the code here: https://github.com/seanboyce/tinylight

An additional one you might like: I did PWM for LED dimming in the tens of Mhz for some 1 Watt red LEDs. This is for my wife -- when she has a migraine she prefers very dim red light to complete darkness. In the Mhz range, there's no visible flicker by a longshot (although it costs a little more power). Most PWM systems I've seen that flicker, use lower-frequency signals.

It must have been cool to play with LEDs in the 70s. We sort of take them for granted now, but they are so awesome. Truly we live in an age of wonders.

WalterBright8• 1 year ago

Thank you for the awesome reply!

eru6• 1 year ago

It's used for lots of interesting things, such as temperature control, motor control and positioning, and LED lighting.

A pretty slow version of this is used in your microwave or airfryer. But they typically use a temperature sense (like a bimetallic strip) to turn the heating parts on for at least a few seconds and then turn it off again; they don't use a timer.

This is known as bang-bang control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control

KennyBlanken4• 1 year ago

It is widely known and has been utilized extensively for decades because the junction is more efficient when cool. Running it at a lower duty cycle allows for higher peak current/light output.

derplerpmerp• 1 year ago

That’s literally how LED drivers have worked for half a century.

adrian_b• 1 year ago

In the now distant past, all manufacturers of electronic components published very extensive datasheets, application notes and user handbooks for all the devices that they were selling.

One could typically learn much more electronics from the application notes or maintenance manuals of the vendors than from university courses.

This included LEDs. For instance Hewlett-Packard published a good handbook for their LEDs, where many useful techniques for designing with LEDs were explained, including what you mention, that LEDs may have higher luminous efficiency at very high currents, so for achieving a given luminous flux you may save energy by operating them with pulsed currents.

The use of multiplexing in the interfaces of multi-digit/multi-character LED displays (e.g for clocks or calculators) not only reduces the number of wires in the interface, but it also improves the energy efficiency, because only one digit/character is powered on, at a much higher current, but for a much shorter duration in comparison with a non-multiplexed display.

During the golden era of electronics documentation, it could be difficult to get the vendor documentation, even if it was usually free, when you were located far away, e.g. in another country.

When the Internet has appeared, for a short time it solved this problem so you could be located at the other end of the world and still access easily the datasheets, application notes and user manuals.

Unfortunately, very soon after that, towards the end of the nineties and much more since 2000, the quality of technical documentation has degraded tremendously, so you now have easy access, but to much less useful information.

ACCount362• 1 year ago

Too many companies nowadays just straight up lock all relevant documentation behind a contract and an NDA.

You want anything more than a 2 page marketing fluff piece? Talk to the sales! If you agree to a MOQ of 50000 and sign away your soul in a two miles long NDA, then you can have a look at the documentation. With one eye only. For a couple minutes.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

At this point I don't care about sustainable. I just want dimmable LEDs that don't flicker!

quickthrowman4• 1 year ago

Buy commercial fixtures or drivers with 0-10V dimming, problem solved.

PantaloonFlames2• 1 year ago

Is a driver something I can easily replace in an existing fixture?

WaltPurvis• 1 year ago

This may be an erroneous and/or too simplistic answer, but I went through a couple rounds of using off-brand LEDs from Amazon in a chandelier, and they flickered badly when dimmed, then I finally ponied up a little more money and bought GE bulbs at Lowe's —- no flickering, ever.

droopyEyelids2• 1 year ago

Anyone else a bit uncomfortable with how they say this next generation will have lead in it, but we shouldn’t worry about that?

Jtsummers• 1 year ago

If you're not breaking them open and eating them you're probably fine.

droopyEyelids2• 1 year ago

They’ll be mass produced in staggering quantities, discarded everywhere, and enter the ecosystem. Plus kids be chewing.

NullPrefix• 1 year ago

Can these new LEDS do proper color spectrum or are we still stuck on incandescent bulbs?

raron• 1 year ago

There are some with good color rendering (CRI over 95 - 98), but they are hard to find and much more expensive than the average LED light bulb (many doesn't even have their CRI specified so probably below 70).

AFAIK None of them will ever have continuous spectrum (like the sun or incandescent bulbs), that's a limitation of the physics how they make light.

netbioserror• 1 year ago

Never quite understood the color spectrum complaint, most of the incandescent bulbs I've ever seen are astoundingly red (low temperature), while I've always gotten the greatest color accuracy in my spaces from daylight-temp LEDs.

umvi2• 1 year ago

Now we just need modern houses that have a DC circuit dedicated to lighting

quickthrowman4• 1 year ago

This is an uneconomical idea, mostly due to voltage drop. In the commercial world, you can get 158 28-watt 2x4s on a single 277V 20A circuit using #12 wire.

umvi2• 1 year ago

So it's more economical to put a failure prone AC/DC converter into every single led bulb?

econ2• 1 year ago

I've bought 3 cheap alarm clocks and the LEDs are now so "good" the display lights up the entire room. With limited bedroom materials my inner macgyver was quite pleased with himself when he put one in a sock which has nothing to do with the topic but it did work. I can also confirm that cheap clocks are still amazingly hard to configure. By pressing multiple buttons simultaneously I managed to set one of the clocks to display the time only when a button is pressed. This is quite useless, I haven't figured out how to unset it and it isn't mentioned in the manual.

My point would be that the LEDs are now so cheap and good that the rest of the devices seem expensive by comparison and manufacturing can't resist the urge to wrap them in crap. I think I've purchased 30 bicycle lights in total. The Edison bulbs with dynamo sometimes last a hundred years (except from the replaceable bulb)

imp0cat• 1 year ago

You have to admit that even though some parts of the LED bike lights might be lacking, they are still pretty awesome compared to what was available when incadescent lights were the only option.

econ2• 1 year ago

Last two collect water inside the button. Can't switch them off. One more expensive set had the rubber casing peal off because the strap is gently pulling on it. My current expensive one had its button drop into the casing. I bring it inside now as it obviously can't get wet.

The amount of light is great but we have a lot of "narrow" bike paths and people point them forwards blinding the opponent.

rob742• 1 year ago

We’d like to avoid the grave.

Don't we all... but somehow I get the feeling that something was "lost in translation" here?

jonathandramble• 1 year ago

No. Cradle to grave is a common term in life cycle analysis for products.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/help/glossary/eea-glossary/cradle-...

laserbeam• 1 year ago

Aren’t perovskites incredibly fragile? I thought the reason they aren’t used in solar panels is because they only last a couple years. Why should I believe LEDs made out if the same stuff would survive the test of time?

ryukoposting• 1 year ago

To make a long story short:

Perovskites are a particular physical structure that atoms can form together. It looks like a box made of one element, with one atom of another element inside inside the box. Perovskites are named after the naturally-occurring mineral that exhibits this structure.

Mother Nature's Perovskite is made of Calcium and Titanium. Synthetic, flourescent perovskites are made of Lead and Cadmium. You can see the problem here.

And yes, Lead is a massive problem even if the article downplays it somewhat. You can't put lead things outside, because rain will cause lead to leech into water supplies. That's bad.

noqc• 1 year ago

leds are pretty small right? Typically encased glass? I don't think you've got much to worry about.

baggy_trough• 1 year ago

I don't think there are any light bulbs in my house that I have replaced more often than the LED bulbs, probably by a factor of 5x.

  - light quality, especially years ago, was much too harsh.  Color is still just barely tolerable for certain bulb types.  
  - inability to dim without flickering  
  - random burnouts (wasn't this supposed to take 10 years at least?)

Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable

Related Stories