UV light tests

Tried the glow in the dark parts under a real fluorescent UV light (not an LED source, which has a lot more emissions in the visible spectrum).

With a 20W lamp the rubber fully charges when you stand less than 2 meters from the source. At greater distances the pigment still charges, but not to full intensity.

That said full intensity is really a lot brighter than you'd expect; the two small yellow grommets get bright enough to be able to read a book with no other light source. A 5x5 inch square of pigment is like a tiny lamp when fully charged.

At 1 meter distance, it takes only 10 seconds or so to fully charge. If you can put the parts against the lamp itself they're fully charged up in less than 2 seconds. Yellow-green charges the quickest, other colors require more time and to be held closer to the UV source. Of course in a club you may find a UV source that's stronger than 20W, then all measurements will yield better results, but it's not clear by how much. Intensity of light decreases with the square of the distance, and the next power rating of 60W is probably only 3x as bright as 20W so we don't expect qualitative differences.

Now, unfortunately it looks like these pigments are not fluorescent at all. They absorb the light and reemit it but in UV light they don't look as bright as a plain white piece of paper. In UV light they are just nicely colored (no longer off white); they don't shine very brightly.

So unfortunately even the "club" scenario is ruled out by these latest measurements!

If you want to show off your DL2000 in a club you're much better off having fluorescent parts (which do not store energy but re-emit it instantly at a lower wavelength) than glow in the dark parts.

We probably won't end up making every unit using glow in the dark parts, but we do have *some* parts now and some left over pigment to create even more, so we'd like to hear your preference:

- use glow in the dark pigment: you can "play with it" (it's quite cool) but most times it will just look like a dirty white

- use black (looks better in ordinary light, but not so fancy)

If you consider that a "club mode" can be created very simply by allowing the full color LED inside the device to lighten up the transparent enclosure with pulsating colored light, it seems this glow in the dark business is many steps away from having practical usefulness.

We just wanted to play around with the glow in the dark pigments as we waited for other stuff to get done. It was very cool, not very useful, but definitely worth experimenting with.

Comments