Review of Wireless LEDs

[Richard Baker]

https://youtu.be/QL7bwm_FqlA

An interesting technology, some limitations in how you can use them

[bigbluejavelin]

Pretty cool, I can see them being used for car headlights or a landed Klingon bird of prey diorama.

[EVApodman]

A cor possibly since it would sit inside the loop. I don't know about the BOP since it they would probably be too high above the loop to work.

[southwestforests]

Those are interesting. Definitely a thing modelers will find applications for.
In YT comments several people have talked about effects for miniatures games and other gameboards.

[EVApodman]

One possibility if the lights would be too high above the loop to work is to place them in the feet, landing gear, and then feed the light using fiber optics to where they are needed.

[Richard Baker]

I can see this product being a good solution in very specific cases- those where it would be impossible of undesirable to have a wired LED connection.
One such use could be if someone was trying to build a ship from that new Federation Starship design with separated nacelles in a display. Use a couple of the wireless LEDs in a nacelle floating on monofilament outside the hull.
This review was of the smaller, cheaper unit- the ten inch version is supposed to have a greater range. I can see it being used on a space dock with a ship under repair/construction.
NanoLEDs and microwire/foils allow you to put lighting just about anywhere these days so while a fun concept, these wireless ones are not going to do a better job outside some special cases. Dioramas with SFX (like the ones that guy makes with bare filament LEDs being used for laser bolts or the Seaquest with those whisker subs moving in formation with it come to mind. It is a new technology with an interesting approach but it does have enough limitations I think I will wait and see how it evolves into something with wider applications myself...

[Ant]

To be fair, this is not a new technology at all - induction has been known about for almost as long as electricity. All these are are the combination of an inductive power source glued to a LED. But that's also it's biggest weakness - the size of the pick-up coils and the distance and alignment between them and the source coil are the overriding factors of how well this works.

The specific advantage of these LEDs is they are wireless inside a very small overall package. If you just want a wireless model, in almost every case you would be much better off having a much larger pick-up loop somewhere in the model where there is space, and just connecting the LEDs to that (with appropriate circuitry).

[Richard Baker]

Yep, that's how I charge my phone

To be more accurate, I should have said a new "application" of technology.

[Zubie]

Interesting, but does seem of limited use. Moreover, the angular placement of these LEDs would seem very important. It's a field that circles around the circumference of the donut with the strongest area within the center of the loop, thinning out quite quickly elsewhere (IIRC the math is a tad complicated)

Given the low power demand for some LED's, I wonder if it would be possible to power an LED with a rectifier circuit off radio and cell phone transmissions. I recall an old article in SciAm with a design for a "perpetual motion" machine. Now it was no such thing, but it did operate continuously once started. The secret was that while the device had no connecting power supply, the armature hid antennas that could pick up enough energy to kick the wheel around enough to compensate for what was lost to friction. In fact the article went on to comment that under some circumstances it could actually accelerate. I suspect that per square meter, there's more energy just in the air in some settings now than what there was in the 80s. Of course, getting a good antenna set up internally on a model (or whatever) would be the real trick. If just more SF designs came with solar panels, it would solve a lot of problems

[publiusr]

There may be a new way to light up surfaces:
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-str ... onics.html

Their invention hinges on the discovery of a method to produce a high-brightness elastic light-emitting polymer, which functions like a filament in a lightbulb. The group's resulting display is made entirely of stretchy polymers—synthetic plastic materials. The device has a maximum brightness at least two times that of a cellphone and can be stretched up to twice its original length without tearing.


I can see this going over Round2 nacelle caps

New large area LEDs
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-fabricate ... eleds.html


Toy tech?
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-str ... eries.html


On plastics
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-plastic-constituent.html