New lighting control program

A new program, named lightaware is finally made by dchen4, as a part of his school project, finally we are able to turn the lights on and off, receive full telemetry information including light level, movement, voltage, current, active power and power factor from the lanterns. Needless to say it tracks everything he could ever need.

My obsession with calcium halophosphate or really conventional lamps.

Halophosphate lamps with colour of 640, 765 (MCF/MCFE, TL-D, YZ36RL25), alongside externally ballasted coated 250/400w MV (MBF/U = GGY = HQL = HSL = HPL-N, mercury vapour nomenclature for ya) high bays , as well as 150/250w tubular high pressure sodium (SON-T, Vialox NAV-T, Lucalox) especially in fixtures that have a few of these in tandem, dominated my childhood. Obviously Veronica wasn’t around back then and she is absolutely disgusted by the terrible colour rendering which most of these exhibits (Not sodium because who hates warm monochromatic light). I however have a very distinct stance towards these older technologies, and the terrible light these things emit generates a strong sense of nostalgia.

But being in Australia means it is very hard to get these things, especially since the 2023 mercury vapour ban, it has been increasingly hard to obtain any meaningful lamps for a cheap price, as some demand still exists which lead to price gouging, same with halophosphate tubes, all I can get are ‘miniature’ ones of special lengths, which makes sense since regular length halophosphate lifemax tubes wasn’t even a thing in 2014, but even in old lighting stores there’s literally zero stock, I got two Japanese tubes (FL40SS/37, both tri-phosphor 842 and 855) and no T8 halophosphate in standard length could ever be seen, maybe except some 80s ELMA made Thorn 36w T8 cool white which I’d like to keep them as is.

 

What lamps are good for backyard lighting?

I’m sure people across the times had tried various lamps and ways to light their backyard, despite the fact I’m less professional when it comes to lamps and lighting, compared to dchen4, my opinions are much more reasonable than some 1kw metal halides, or high pressure sodium for that matter.

Currently the backyard (or at least a portion of) is lit by a singular weatherproof batten, only 1x14w T5 tube, with rated life of 12000h, not so impressive by tri-phosphor standard. It is controlled by a smart socket, which dchen4 had written a small python program to fetch sunset and sunrise times everyday, then a cron job is scheduled every day at 12PM to execute the script, and the script will add on and off commands to the AT queue to essentially turn the lamp on and off at defined times. Very rudimentary, but it works too well. This way we can also time the lamp life and perhaps in the future, number of cycles.

The ballast was originally instant start, but dchen4 modified it to be PTC preheat start, the effect is quite impressive and hopefully there is going to be a extension of lamp life. I think it’s gonna last more than 12000 hours. Simple self oscillating ballast with 2×13003 transistors, however it does have EOL protection by voltage which is kind of neat.