I've been planning on buying a 3W RGB LED and building control circuitry for a couple of years based on a project at Instructables.com, but I just never seem to get around to it. A 3W LED should be bright enough for demos in a large classroom or even a small lecture hall. I was just about to order the parts to have it in time for the 2009 AAPT summer meeting, when I stumbled across this cool light from Eaglelight that already exists.
The DMAPT is doing a Make and Take session at the summer meeting. One of our make and takes is a much smaller color changing LED (Ping-Pong Ball Color Mixer Revisited, The Physics Teacher Feb, 2007) and I'd like to have a big version to show off when we're introducing the projects.
Now, the light doesn't do everything I'd like it to do, but it's already together in a very compact package. The added benefit here is that other teachers I show it to will be able to simply buy it rather than build it. It also includes an IR remote control so I can change the color from about 10 feet away (I'll have to be sure not to loose this).
The light has 16 pre-programed colors and four different modes to cycle through the colors. The colors available are a white, red, blue, green and 12 mixes of red/blue, red/green, and blue/green. You can't actually see the red, green, or blue elements, but the colors are very true. Make the light yellow and you can clearly distinguish red and green objects, while blue objects appear black. Overall, at $32, I'm very pleased with my purchase. Had I bought parts to build the light I wanted to it would probably have been only slightly cheaper (the 3W RGB LED alone is $16). Check out the brief video below to see the light in action!
