I can't pretend to have done anything as impressive as Chris, but for the past few years I have been experimenting around the home with Philips Luxeon LED's. This is the second year that I've had them up as Christmas lights outside the house.
Luxeon is the brightest LED light source currently available, and the brilliant beam of coloured light from such a tiny package means you can achieve some pretty neat results. The effect I wanted to create is one of small pools of intense coloured light on the walls of the house, but with the actual light source being completely hidden from view.
As I hope you can see, Luxeon is perfect for this application
Forty-eight LED's in four different colours are affixed around the edge trim of the roof. They point directly at the wall under the eaves, which is about 8" ahead of each LED. They are mounted at 17" centres which is just sufficient to allow each pool of light to overlap. The colour of light delivered by the LED's is unbelievably saturated, and I think it really intrigues a lot of people because they just can't see where the light is coming from!
I used the 1-watt LED's in this application, series-wired in four 34-Volt DC strings with blue and green LED's being driven at 350mA, and red and amber operating at 250mA with Philips driver units. You can see the light in the daytime but only if you look out for it. In late afternoon and night though the effect is quite remarkable. Five-watt LED's were too bright for this application, unless of course you intend to mount them further away from the object to be illuminated. Maybe I'll set some of those up next year to highlight other areas if I get the time! The blue and green narrow-beam versions do a stunning job of floodlighting trees etc from the ground in very rich colours.
The best thing though, is that because of the super-slim nature of these LEDs and the fact that you can't even see where they are when they're illuminated, these lights can stay in place all year round. And with a 50,000 hour life they should outlive the house, so I don't plan on having to do any maintenance on them ever again! Total power consumption is barely 50 Watts so they are cheap to run as well.
[This message has been edited by James (edited December 10, 2002).]
