Semi OT: LED traffic light failures

Oh. Sorry. Try to stay out of the piss. Smells, you know.

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 10:38:35 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

Please accept mine for being an asshole. I am so used to not getting any credence the rare event that you have offered deserves respect.

I just watched a news piece where an ill trained university PIG in my home town shot and killed a man, then he and his complicit partner lied about the chain of events. Then I watched as an honorable prosecutor derided the act for exactly what it was... murder. Maybe the world truly is changing. They need to charge the partner who backed his story as well.

Let's not any of us put that asshole Trump in power. The guy has to be the dumbest rich man to have ever lived.

Most cities also pay for private management of said lights as well, instead of performing maintenance and setting of the controls themselves. Pretty pathetic, actually.

What is it "Allied Signal", I think.

A veiled insult perhaps? And here I thought you were being genuine. Perhaps my apology came without merit.

I have been studying the problem for years. They pay a quarter million dollars for an advanced control mech, then set the thing to a timer during the day, despite having sensors in the roads. We could have stuck with the 1940s era washer and dryer timers with that being the case. As it stands, most retarded cities set things up with the BASIC boilerplate program, and only put a signal on "priority mode" at night..

Traffic signals are probably even pumped with DC by now. If not I would still consider it to be pretty stupid given LED technology. Street lamps are driven by whatever the lamp needs are, and they vary, just as the lamps themselves do.

Still, the man who was electrocuted sitting at a bus stop in SD, was killed by a poorly (or deliberately) miswired junction box for street lighting.

I have solutions for a lot of things.

Currently the idiots cut huge 4 foot diamonds in the ground and place huge loops and only a couple per lane at an intersection. When it gets wet or one fails, the entire signal function screws up.

I have suggested for a long time now 18 inch round cuts and overlapping loops where 5 each go in place of each 4 foot loop, and then when and if one fails, the controller smarts would catch it and ignore the failed loop. yet continue proper function with the redundants, and even send a message to schedule the repair, which can be time managed to reduce costs, all the while the signal still works.

LED street lamps could have 24 hr backup batteries in them such that a failure does not cause a blacked out section, but continues working through the night.

I have given these simple solutions a lot of thought, and the idiot city managers who jack off at the mouth about how much it costs to "get someone out there" for repairs "right away" would all go away.

The idiots who mfgr the controllers are still selling cities '70s technology, at best. And charging a premium price for it, and then selling them upkeep contracts too. How lame. How sad. How pathetic our "broke dick" cities have become.

Instead of keeping a mechanic on board, they buy entire new fleets of vehicles in an ongoing yearly basis.

Grumpy Jenkins proved that a "seasoned block" is more bulletproof than a new one, so all these old PIG cars and utility vehicles should be seeing 15 year service lives, not three.

Then we would not have cities strapped for cash. the "managers" need to take pay cuts as well. I have given traffic control and raw, unmitigated PIGGERY a lot of thought over the years.

Put me in office. Yes, I will build a border wall, and no it will not be penetrated. And yes, prison inmates will perform the work of making the bricks. And a whole lot more. And yes, dirty PIGs will go to prison too instead of being let off without even a wrist slap.

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 12:50:47 -0500, John S Gave us:

Compared to incandescents it is NEGLIGIBLE.

Lenses are what they used to use, and there are plenty around. Cut up some old Hollywood filters. Plenty of those discarded around.

Again, 'efficiency' in this case is moot. The cost of maintaining three colors is greater than ONE. Period.

Then, even the dumbest pole climber can do the service.

My idea is cheaper in the long run, and "broke" city claims are rampant. Who ya gonna call?

ME. Yoda. TutAmongUs.

My signal idea even has six (or more) units inside it (each vertical stack), all white and a failure can be temporarily fixed immediately by simply cycling the conveyor around. And THEN scheduling the maintenance at night when traffic is minimal.

BOOM shakalakalaka.

My ideas will ALL win! (and be cheaper too!)

I understand that a lens is an optical bandpass filter, and that a lens doesn't create light at wavelengths that the LED doesn't emit.

You snipped my link to the typical white LED spectrum. It's inconvenient to your argument.

Oh and it would have been

Tell that to the greenies.

as they used tinted lenses as well. They would have been fine and

A white+filter will be very inefficient, so it would need more current than monochromatic LEDs, so would run hotter.

The red output would be nil. I doubt that you'd get 1% efficiency filtering a standard white LED to red. Red is down the visual curve, so you actually need more red photons. You'd have to run 100x the current.

Efficiency does matter, both for energy use and to keep from cooking the LEDs. Well, you could develop a new phosphor for the blue>red conversion, but then you may as well just use red LEDs

You always say that when you're wrong. It doesn't work.

I have wondered why LCD displays don't use RGB sequential backlights. Efficiency would be great and you'd get 3x or 4x as many pixels for free. I guess the LCD physics is too slow.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Driving to work yesterday, I was stunned to see a parking spot on Folsom Street, so I parked and took some better pics. Four at a single interesction, 24th and Folsom. There are net 8 green lights at that intersection, so half are bad.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Sounds like bonding pad problems. Maybe.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

The "...incandescent 'bulbs' were given their 'color' via the 'lens'...".

[...]

Who is fighting?

cheers, joe

Actually, and sorry for not pointing that out clearly, I was having the human eye's color sensitivity in the back of my mind when I wrote that. However, I don't know from the same back of my head whether the eye is more or rather less sensitive to green than to yellow and/or red.

As to your uncertainty with respect to the 40-50% more power and heat, you stated earlier, and correctly I think, that light is relative to the current. In that case a higher voltage would not change the light output. So yes, 40-50% more power due to the higher voltage would roughly not result in a higher light output.

cheers, joe

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 12:15:26 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Nobody said anything about 'creation' . Green LEDs already have green plastic on them. I guess you all missed that simple FACT. So they already filter the total light output.

Red LEDs have RED plastic on them. Yellow LEDs have YELLOW PLASTIC on them. Wake up and smell the cheaper white LED inventory! Much less the fact that WHITE LEDs HAVE been engineered to higher wattage and lifespan devices, and the others have NOT.

While you are at it, analyze the FACT that it would make the entire system CHEAPER to operate. Only one style to stock and replace.

Currently, the idiots merely retro-fitted the currently used CRAP, and STILL are using the same multi-kilowatt controllers on them.

MY system would reduce the operating costs of any given city by millions a year, much to the chagrin or the power companies, who charge business rates.

Try again.

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 12:15:26 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

That must be why military flashlights include several colored filter 'lenses' issued with them to facilitate specific tasks.

Small LCD displays do not, but larger back and edge lighted LCD displays do use RGB LED's. A major part of the design is regulating the relative brightness of the three colors. All of the 3 color LEDs will fade in time, but not at the same rate. So, there are photodetectors to measure the light output for each color, and readjust the LED levels (using pulse width modulation) so that the combined color is always pure white.

The down side is that eventually the brightness level drops to where the circuitry can no longer compensate. 50% loss in brightness is considered the failure point. Then, it's time for a new TV.

Color Stabilization of RGB LEDs in an LED Backlighting Example

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

On 29 Jul 2015 22:38:16 GMT, joe hey Gave us:

That is my point exac.tly, ya dope.

I guess you need remedial English coursework. The term does not only refer to two idiots bludgeoning each other. Sheesh, grow up, children.

Oh and "you lose" does not infer a fight. It could refer to a debate or argument, putz. But thanks for playing. You got the response you deserve as a result.

2.7 million hits. I guess bulbs are going to be around for a long time. Note the photos of LED bulbs:

Take a white LED flashlight and put a red filter in front of it. If you don't have a red filter, borrow one out of an old red LED digital clock. What do you see through the filter? Probably nothing. When you're done with the experiment that proves you wrong, I suggest you offer John Larkin an apology.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I meant sequential RGB, like a Nipow disk. That would deliver 3x or 4x the brightness and 3x or 4x the pixels of CW backlighting.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

OK, try looking at a white LED through a red filter. You won't see much. A "white" led isn't actually white. See the snipped graph.

Actually, the green, maybe 530 nm, is pretty wimpy too.

How do white LEDs have longer lifetimes? They are just blue LEDs with phosphors glopped on top. Some of the phosphors actually degrade faster than the LEDs.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Sure. Incandescents are thermal, blackbody, wideband emitters. White LEDs aren't.

Imagine running that through a red bandpass filter at 650 nm maybe.

But filtering an incandescent is also very inefficient. A fraction of the colored light gets through.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

No, white LEDs are not really broadband. But your graph shows significant energy in the red part of the spectrum. It is just spread over a wider band than the narrow peak of the LED itself. To compare you would need to integrate the two portions of the curve or more accurately convolve them with the spectral response curve of each of the three color receptors. To me they look pretty equal or even more in the red.

The spectral content that would technically be green is not so important as that is not how the eye works. Rather than needing green light the three receptors in the eye need to be stimulated in the appropriate ratios.

--

Rick

I wonder if there is a business refurbishing those led assemblies?

There's an Far Eastern outfit that's been pushing sequential color for years for segmented displays. Their demo displays look fine. I suspect there is a patent on it and they're too proud of their technology or something like that.

--sp

--
Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany 
Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition:            http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 
Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48