Cree and LED lighting are starting a revolution
Cree’s Applications Engineers are always cooking up some kind of contest. To celebrate Halloween, they decided to have a pumpkin carving contest using Cree LEDs. Fellow Cree employees got to vote on the winner. You can see the pumpkins up close and learn what LEDs are inside on our Facebook page.
We’ll reveal who Cree employees selected as the winner later this afternoon. In the meantime, head over to our facebook page to get your vote in!
At Cree, we’ve seen it all when it comes to LED fixture design – the good, the bad and the ugly. And now we’re launching a new set of services designed to let LED lighting fixture designers take advantage of our extensive experience working with LEDs.
Today we’re launching Cree TEMPO™ Services, a comprehensive set of quantitative and qualitative tests and analyses for LED-based lighting fixtures and lamps. TEMPO stands for Thermal, Electrical, Mechanical, Photometric and Optical and our new testing services gives LED customers a chance to have all those aspects of their fixtures tested.
We want to help manufacturers overcome system design challenges, increase product quality and instill confidence in their buyers. More details on this service are available on this website we launched today.
Watch our video to find out details on why Cree TEMPO Services could help save LED manufacturers time and money.
For even more details on TEMPO Services read our press release here.
Matt Bransky couldn’t do his job without a bright flashlight. Matt is an aircraft mechanic for Southwest Airlines. So when planes are grounded overnight, he relies on his trusty flashlight to illuminate his work area.
When one of his flashlights stopped working a few years ago, Matt figured he could fix it. After all, he is a mechanic. So he searched online for tips on how to take a flashlight apart and found CandlePowerForums. The online forum is dedicated to a variety of lighting discussions including flashlights, lanterns, spotlights, night vision scopes, and headlamps. Matt’s simple Google search in 2006 soon sparked a new hobby and helped him meet new friends when he later moved from Chicago to Dallas.
CandlePowerForums boasts more than 114,000 members, many of whom regularly pose questions about the lights they’re building or customizing, show off custom lights they’ve created and reminisce on topics like “What was your first loved flashlight?” Many of the posts center around the usage of LEDs.
“It’s just a share and share community,” he said. “Someone comes up with an idea and everyone else runs with it.”
CandlePowerForum members at the Dallas-Fort Worth meetup.
Matt says he reads more than he posts on the forums. And while he says he has a broad range of knowledge about LED components and flashlight parts, he considers his knowledge intermediate compared to some of the knowledgeable participants in the forum.
And since the CandlePowerForums community has so much to share online, some of them even get together offline for meetups. When Matt moved to Dallas a few years ago, he found out about one and went. Soon he was helping organize them.
The latest Dallas-Fort Worth Meetup was May 8, where 21 like-minded light-lovers showed up to continue their online discussions in the flesh. “It’s a time when you can meet with people who don’t think you’re weird for talking about flashlights,” Matt said.
CandlePowerForum members in the Dallas-Fort Worth area got together May 8 to talk about lights.
We thanked Matt for reaching out to us by sending him a couple of CreeLEDRevolution.com T-shirts and collapsible Coleman lanterns lit by a Cree XLamp® XR-E LED. We hope the prizes ended up in LED-loving hands.
Last month I told you Cree’s XLamp® XP-G was a finalist in ECN Magazine’s 2009 Reader’s Choice Tech Awards. Well, the votes are in and we won the award in the Optoelectronics and Displays category!
We’re thrilled to be recognized for making a brighter and more efficient LED. And it’s even better knowing that we were selected by readers and our fans to win the award.
But don’t worry, we’re not just going to tuck this award on the cyber-shelf and stare at it. Our Research and Development teams are working hard now to push lumen output and efficacy even further. We’ve already come a long way since 1989.
Cree’s XLamp XP-G is a finalist for the 2009 ECN Tech Awards (click here to vote)! Fellow LED geeks can read the specs on the XLamp XP-G and understand why it’s receiving recognition.
If you don’t know much about LEDs, you probably don’t know why this is such an amazing creation. But I want everyone to be as excited as we are about the XP-G, so I’m going to explain why in simple terms.
Here’s the deal: There are two particularly important things we measure about LEDs. One is how much light an LED puts out, which is measured in lumens. The other is how much energy it consumes when it puts out that light, which is called efficacy (not to be confused with the similarly-spelled efficiency). Efficacy is measured in lumens per watt or LPW.
So now that you’re armed with that knowledge, consider this:
Cree’s XLamp XP-G is currently the brightest and most efficient LED available in the industry. Here’s why: It can produce up to 367 lumens when driven at 1 Amp, at a typical efficacy of 111 lumens per watt. Now that, my dear blog readers, is very bright and efficient.
So why does all of that matter?
Well, when an LED becomes brighter and more efficient, it can potentially reduce the number of LEDs needed in an LED lighting fixture, as well as the size and the cost of the fixture. Each of these breakthroughs in LED technology means it’s becoming easier to join the LED Lighting Revolution. (Look at this photo of my co-worker holding an XP-G to get a feel for how small it is.)
So, this brings me back to the 2009 ECN Tech Awards. The Cree XLamp XP-G is a finalist in the Optoelectronics & Displays category. Now that you understand more about the product, we sure would appreciate your vote. Thanks!
