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11/15/2004 Archived Entry: "Electronics"

It just occured to me that I don't know jack about electronics. I know extremely basic stuff, as in "Don't put your finger in the outlet." Anything further than that and you might as well be speaking to me in Chinese.

I thought it would be fun, and inexpensive, to learn just a little electronics to figure out LED's. I kinda favor fibre optic cable stuff more, but John seems to get a kick out of LED's so I thought I'd attempt to learn about them. I found a really informative site about LED's, though they say it's for beginners I'm thinking I'm still way too green (530nm, 2.1 volts!) to know what the hell they're talking about.

I don't know anything about voltage, diodes, wavelengths, or anything like that. Hell, whatever I knew about it was blocked from my memory along with the rest of the brain trauma high school put me through. Now that I've got Google and an internet connection, I can learn on my own pace without having it forcefed to me. Let's face it, no one likes to learn things they're not interested in, ADD or no ADD.

In Other News...
Speaking of my ADD, I'm changing the subject on you! Yay! You'll never guess what I did yesterday. I spent the whole of yesterday (actually from 3pm-11pm) re-caulking the tub and painting the wall above the shower with white sealant. You won't believe how much WORK you have to do just to reseal the tub and shower, strip the wallpaper off the walls, and then repaint the drywall with a mildew resistant sealant.

Our bathroom is old, I mean... really old, makeshift, and had been neglected for who knows how long. So on Sunday I bought a caulk gun, one tube of white silicone tub caulk, a Paper Tiger wallpaper stripper, brushes, and one gallon of white water-based sealant paint and fixed the shower and tub. I took measurements of the bathroom floor so that we could replace the old flooring with linoleum. I've never refloored anything before, and the bathroom is small enough to practice on. I eventually plan to strip ALL the wallpaper out of that bathroom and paint all the walls with sealant and then possibly re-wallpaper or use a latex tinted paint on the walls and just stamp or stencil on a nice pattern. I've redone bathrooms before, I'm not intimidated by it at all.

How this has to do with LED's though, is gonna make you flip. Lighting, our house is in dire need of low-voltage, bright lighting. The fixtures are ancient, so ancient that if we're not careful on how we replace fixtures we're afraid we'll burn down the whole house! So... if John and I can figure out LED's, it would be an extremely cool and affordable way to light up the house. I haven't told John about being willing to work with LED's for lighting, since he only showed me the links to the LED lighting this morning. I found some of the methods kind of... not so bright. As in, when you combine colored LED's to produce white light, you get a sort of dim, sleepy white instead of a nice white that I could draw by. But I found this site in the UK that offers a series of LED's called daylight brights and if we can learn how to hook up a series of those in the places of our house that don't get enough lighting, it'd be wonderful!

If we can take out the old can lights from the kitchen and replace them with LED's that are outside-powered (as in a seperate powersource aside from the house's electricity) batteries or a rechargeable of some persuasion, we won't have to fear about burning down the house because of ancient wiring. Our house is so old, that the older wiring has cloth insulators. CLOTH INSULATORS!! No wonder we have mice tearing our house up, lots of lovely cloth to make nests in.

But yes, if we can light up that house with inexpensive and fairly hi-tech lighting it'd be phenomenal. I'm willing to learn about LED's if it means we can do something together that we both have enough interest in that it could benefit us in some way. I'm all for it! But I need to learn about it all first. I need to actually make a few lights on my own and tweak around with them.

Hmm, I wonder how an LED would look/behave behind sheets of stained or etched glass...