Given the new baby and all, we have to be able to get up at strange hours of the night to change diapers, and this requires having enough ambient light to avoid bumping into anything. However, where a normal night light does that job, we also need enough light to illuminate the aforementioned baby, so you can tell when you've got things, umm, sufficiently clean.

Gadget freak that I am, it would seem that what we need is:

- a floor-standing lamp (easy to move around as we continue dorking with the room arrangement)
- with a dimmer (so we can tune it to a desirable brightness level)
- that isn't very hot (to avoid any unpleasant burning sensations in the aforementioned middle of the night)

It looks like I can satisfy #1 and #3 with a floor-standing LED lamp (such as this one), but those don't appear to have dimmers on them. Are dimmers and LED lamps mutually exclusive? I suppose they could always just blink them fast enough, or only turn a fraction of the bulbs on, but I don't know if anybody actualy does that in a lamp. Another possibility is the standard "torchiere" halogen floor lamp, I suppose, although I'd rather be able to illuminate the changing table without lighting up the whole world around it.

Thoughts?

If you can't find anything better than a "torchiere" I would recommend a fluorescent one instead.

The one I have only has 3 levels of brightness (achieved by turning on different combos of bulbs) but it doesn't get hot enough to be used as a cooking device.

I previously had a halogen one but they get way too hot.

I've been doing more research on this. Turns out, LED arrays either operate on 120vac (making them plug-compatible with normal bulbs) or on 12vdc. If you buy the 12vdc versions, then you can buy a dimmer. Here's one page of possible solutions.

Now I just have to find a lamp where it's easy to hack in an external flashing controller.

You may be having issues finding a dimmable LED fixture due to patents Color Kinetics was awarded. They have many patents on things such as pulse width modulation (blinking LEDs to simulate dimming) and they love to protect them. Going after Chinese companies it a lot harder, but they often go after companies in the US selling such fixtures. This is why the LED fixtures we distribute actually get dimmer by lowering the power provided to each LED. But, our stuff does color mixing so that's not what you really want, plus it makes it a lot more expensive.

Might I suggest looking at a dimmable flourescent such as this? It will probably cheaper since it's already dimmable out of the box, and it won't get as hot as an incandescent lamp. It may not get as dim as you want though. I think their range of brightness is pretty limited. This one claims to go from 100% to 10%. Maybe they got better from the one I have...

Minimum brightness is definitely the problem. For now, we're using an old incadescent lamp with 40 watt bulbs. It's way, way too bright. Maybe a good answer is to get red bulbs (like this one or that one), which seem to be favored by astronomers because they don't mess with your eyes' dark adaptation. Given that the particular lamp we're using has blue frosted glass, that would only further attenuate the light...

The empeg's LED does use PWM as far as I remember. Everytime I read about the status of those patents in the lighting trade mags, they make no mention of consumer devices where LEDs are used as indicators. They seem to only be going after companies using PWM for lighting purposes. There is proof of a disco effect from the '70s that uses PWM. This is currently the most promising proof that the patent issued to Color Kinetics is invalid. I don't know how they can just take away a patent (don't know much about the process), but it seems it may happen.

EDIT: Here's an article I remember reading a couple months back. Link

There are many such lamps on eBay but they tend to be DMX controlled. You can get very small relatively cheap handheld DMX controllers but I suspect we're getting into the realms of overkill. I recently picked up nine RGB colour fading LED strips for GBP 190 which was a bit of a bargain. A simple par can should set you back about GBP 150 and somewhat less than that for a white one.

As for the patent, what a joke! PWM brightness control is in no way novel, I'm sure just within the group of empeg developers there is prior art going back decades. The very first program I wrote for a PIC did just that. The patent doesn't seem to have stopped many manufacturers around here - there are dozens of brands of LED lighting. Pulsar, just down the road from here, do little else these days - although I suppose it's possible they pay a license.

Rob