We’ve previously described why we’ve chosen to use LED’s for our product. The simple answer is that LED’s are very energy efficient. However, some have claimed that they might not be the best choice after all, if the entire process of producing each lamp is taken into consideration.

Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovations has conducted a study where not only the process of producing an LED has been taken into consideration, but also the energy needed to ship the lamp from China to a place in Europe (say, Sweden? ) for installation. And as it turns out, an LED really is an energy efficient alternative at least equal to compact flouroscents.

Read more in this article from NYT.

The goal of this project is to help people reduce their energy consumption. Since we want people to reduce their energy usage, this also includes us and the gadget we want to produce.

As argued before the gadget should act as a reminder and make us aware about our actions. To do that the gadget needs to communicate with the web and the user. This communication is done with different hardware components that all demand some kind of energy source. Tricky! To reduce energy you need a gadget that makes a contribution to the consumption.

After discussing different forms of notifications, light seems like the best alternative. Light can be programmed in all different sorts of forms like text, symbols and rhythm. Light can also be a really low energy component by using LED (Light Emitting Diodes). LED is predicted to be the future of lights in our home (DN article, in Swedish). The traditional (incandescent) light bulb will soon be prohibited in the EU, and today’s low energy lamps has components (like mercury) that are dangerous for the environment. A LED can hold for 45 000 hours (compared to a traditional light bulbs 1000 h and a low energy lamps 8000 h). Don’t miss to read about the further development of LED, the OLED (Organic Light Mitting Diodes).  Put simply – plastic that emits light. Imagine what that can make! Anyway, we want to use this interesting progress for the gadget.

At this moment we are investigating how to program different LED matrices and we’re discussing what information that is preferred to display on the gadget and how. A big idea is to have three matrices in a cube formation. Through sensors the user can change the information on the matrices by flipping, rotating or shaking the cube. Below are some quick sketches of what it could look like. It would be nice to hear what you think!