Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Aug. 5, 2020. For as much as I have complained about questionable ultraviolet (UV) disinfection pitches during the pandemic, I have to say I’m amazed at some of the true innovation that has happened so quickly — relative to UV and other things. Of course, a COVID-19 vaccine can’t come quickly enough. Still, I’m simply shocked at the speed with which the pharma industry has moved. Having the processing power of supercomputers on desktops does matter in such accelerated endeavors. I do have to admit, however, that I loved the challenge back in the day of somehow freeing up one more byte in a 1k-byte ROM with 8080 machine coding tricks.
Back to the topic at hand, I brought up the speed of innovation because of novel and impactful UV concepts. In our recent UV webcast, we learned about how fast Bob Karlicek’s team created an assembly-line style medical mask disinfection machine. Today we posted a blog item that I wrote about robotic UV systems intended to disinfect airplanes and subway cars. And in giving credit where due, I linked to an original article on the website of our sister publication BioOptics World.
We do have a new packaged LED story for you from Lumileds. The Luxeon 5050 LED that’s the focus of the news is impressive in that it targets among the most challenging of applications yet is in a plastic package. The LED can even be used in lighting sports venues.
That Lumileds story brought up another pain point for me. I/we really need a new way to classify LEDs. Our use of low-, mid-, and high-power classifications goes back years to our sister business unit Strategies Unlimited and the annual worldwide LED report. Those arbitrary boundaries based on watts were obsoleted long ago. You can somewhat segment the market based on package type. But I’m fresh out of a good idea for segmenting the market effectively. If you have a good idea, contact me.
If you saw our HortiCann newsletter Monday, you know I made some comments about the SpaceX mission return from the International Space Station (ISS). The crew left a new horticultural lighting experiment aboard the ISS that our Mark Halper wrote about.
My musings, however, were about the relative lack of elegance of the Dragon program relative to the Space Shuttle. The ocean splashdown took me back to days that significantly predated my bit and byte finagling with 8080 code. I had a chance to speak about it with my son, who is an engineer far more capable than I ever was. He had heard some of the same thoughts expressed, although he really didn’t understand why until I described the way we watched the US Navy pluck Apollo vehicles out of the ocean back in the day.
I did find it both humorous and unfathomable that in this day and age the powers that be could not control the pleasure boaters that showed up to spectate on the recovery. Nothing like boating in an area where noxious fumes might be wafting.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]