LED Streetlight synchronized window shutters

  • Hack Details: You know those LED streetlights and yard lights that everyone thought would be the environmental cat’s pyjamas? They’re crazy bright, they keep kids awake, guide bats, turtles and birds to their doom and go right through astronomer’s narrow band light-pollution filters. We can’t fix all of this in one weekend, but just maybe we could keep the light from shining into the kid’s bedrooms by taking advantage of a unique property of LED lights, most can be switched very fast without damage. So imagine you could close and open your blackout curtains timed perfectly so they were open when the annoying outdoor light was off, and closed when it’s on, 50 times per second or more! You could sleep in moonlight, wake to the natural light of sunrise but the LED would no longer be an annoyance. We can’t open and close curtains that fast but we can toggle electroptical Kerr and Pockels cell window shutters that fast and some LCD and MEMs shutters might work.
  • What you need to make it happen?: White LED Light Arduino modulator Fast electro-optical shutter: Kerr or Pockels cell, from an old (HeNe tube) laser printer or Q-Switched laser. Possibly an electro-optical MEMs device or an old LCD laptop screen if you can figure out how to toggle the TFT transistors fast enough. Doll house with window (for the demo)
  • Name: Brian Nitz
  • Twitter/website: bnitz , http://www.opensourcemechanic.com

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