If you've been following my Christmas light saga, this year's video has made me happier than ever!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSFNufruSKw
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@TechConnectify Happy for you! :D
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@TechConnectify I’m going to be laughing at this incredible line for a long time. :)
“This is not what Christmas looks like. This is what a Vape shop looks like. Or worse, a gaming PC.”
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@rmondello @TechConnectify ironically, I had to use Christmas wrapping paper to cover up the RGB built into my gaming PC
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@TechConnectify Oh yes, that's this time of the year!
I'll watch it right now :3
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@TechConnectify checked the eshop.. And as expected, the color varian is already sold out (surprisingly the webpage is not down from influx of visitors)
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@TechConnectify I bought five sets on the basis of this review. Thanks Alec!
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@paulhart @TechConnectify Alec the influencuuuuuuhhh 😅
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@TechConnectify omg omg congratulations!
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@TechConnectify impossible, i must watch
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@TechConnectify I am about twice your age do they have anything that imitates actual lit candles on a highly flammable conifer. This was common when I was a child.
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@Ulrich_the_elder @TechConnectify
Someone should design an ornament that generates a naked spark randomly about once every 30 hours to recreate this classic experience.
Just for the art of it.
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@TechConnectify I’m very happy for you and excited to watch the video. I like my gaming PC-looking tree, but you may still win me over.
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@TechConnectify My partner has been following this saga by-proxy as I've watched the videos - and after the tease in the previous video she's excited to see where this goes!
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@TechConnectify oh damn!! gotta drop everything and watch this to see if we as a species have finally figured out to put warm-white emitters inside the very same colored glass we used to put filaments in
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@TechConnectify my brain keeps screaming at me that this is what RGB lights are for. I’m not going to say they solve the problem but it seems like they should.
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@norgralin They definitely don't. RGBW might be able to but there really isn't a very effective way to desaturate the color with RGB. I've seen some houses around which use the "all-year" decorations and change the colors and they still look very gamer to me.
This is just... one of those things which has to be done the old fashioned way, and for what it's worth white diodes and colored caps seems a whole lot simpler than RGB!
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@TechConnectify @norgralin I’m enjoying the Philips hue “Festavia” lights. You can’t yet emulate the vintage string of individually coloured lights, but there are a bunch of colour options which are not harsh and some nice twinkle effects too. Also, it’s a very niche case which I guess most people would hate, but I love being able to sync the lights to my TV 😂 https://mastodon.online/@tuckerjj/109644965150381832
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@TechConnectify @norgralin
It might be possible with RGBW + PC Amber.
In this talk given by Chloe LeGendre at SIGGRAPH she describes how they found that that is the minimum number of spectral sources for convincingly faking the lighting on a movie set.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtSJr-je8qY&t=1783s
That was in the context of the light falling on other things though, not looking directly at it, so who knows.
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@TechConnectify
Congratulations. I know how much this means to you.
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@TechConnectify as east german from THE area where christmas decoration isn't important, but IMPORTANT ("Weihnachtsland Erzgebirge" is the main slogan/name for the area now)
…as someone from there, ALL colored lights is kind of a crazy thing for me that only "stupid americans" would ever use. For pretty much the same reasons as yours.
blinking or colors just look… wrong. silly!
like a pink tie or wearing some hawaiian shirt to official events or christmas decoration made out of plastics?
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@TechConnectify now we need some 240v ones 🤔
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@TechConnectify looking forward to watching this. It's not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off the Nakatomi Plaza and Alec rants about Christmas lights.
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@TechConnectify thank you for all your videos, you're a joy in my life.
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@TechConnectify RGB gaming PCs need to be mocked I feel. Its an absolute joke. Don't be afraid. Also, I'm so happy for you, hopefully I can find some eventually in the UK.
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@TechConnectify
The lag of smoothening of the rectified electricity needs way more ranting.
The 50 or 100Hz flickering everywhere is hell on earth!
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@gom Not sure if those extra 20 Hz makes a difference but fwiw I don't really have a problem with unsmoothed 120 Hz flickering.
I can notice it, yes, but it doesn't bother me.
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@TechConnectify
Lucky you :)
I can't unsee it, no matter how hard I try. Of all the super powers possible I only got the one, where I can see if someone was stingy on a ¢5 capacitor 😞
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@TechConnectify I'm hyped!
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@TechConnectify
Man I'm so happy this finally happened!
I personally have a much higher tolerance for "garbage RGB LEDs" and particularly the hated-by-you "amber" (😉), but if you want to recreate a certain nostalgic feeling of yesteryears Christmas... the lights must fit the bill as well! Hopefully they will appear in 230V land as well.
Kind of surprising how long it took to get there at all, with ever increasing CRI white LEDs.
But now I am kind of bummed out this recurring video topic ends.
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@TechConnectify such jolly vibes
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@TechConnectify If nothing else, I love this for the choice of sweater. ell done, Alec!
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@TechConnectify Your obsessive pursuit of such a low stakes endeavour is somehow comforting, as well as entertaining.
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@TechConnectify Too bad. Another sad Christmas next year…
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@TechConnectify Awesome. I love seeing more places running w/ this idea. Now to hope they do smaller strings and/or battery powered stuff. = )
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@TechConnectify thanks for this, RGB LEDs (for lighting) really really bug me. I mean, when I see them I quite like nerding out over what super saturated colours pop out, but for actual home lighting they just look awful and I cannot understand why people put up with them.
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@TechConnectify I think we're soulmates. Had no idea these videos existed, but I've been ranting about this for years, and bought so many different sets trying to get it right. My current set are coloured in with Sharpies!
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@TechConnectify completely off topic: this video nicely explains why I think lightsabers are cutting plasma encapsulated by a coloured forcefield.
I'm glad someone's actually making decent LED Christmas lights now.
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@InsertUser @TechConnectify
That's a very fun head canon! I love that!
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@TechConnectify Thanks & congrats!
Sadly looks like they’re very out of stock and only fulfilling pre-orders in summer of 2025 now.
But hey there’s always next year. 😅
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@TechConnectify they look great. Fingers crossed for a 230-250V variant in future!
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@TechConnectify Thank you so much for this!
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@TechConnectify 19:15 Unfortunately, unlikely we're ever going to get a truly accurate warm glow with LEDs.
Pretty much all LEDs, even the super high end ones advertising 98+ CRI do not have good red spectral emission. The standard phosphors do not produce much emission from 650-700nm, which is what you would need for that truly warm glow.
Same reason you can't find high CRI flame bulbs (they're just orangeish) since CCT below 2700K just needs a ton of red.
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@TechConnectify this is me understanding your pickiness about getting the right color light! I have several rgb light bulbs, mostly Philips, they’re nice. I also have a small desk lamp and that thing makes a very specific purple/violet that I love, but nothing else I have can replicate. It’s so annoying!
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@TechConnectify I lost my mind seeing you’ve been doing this for 7 years. Made me feel like an old man. It doesn’t feel like that long 😭
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@TechConnectify I am that kind of nerd and I wish more people were as nitpicky about these things.
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@Gargron @TechConnectify Me too. That’s a great video.
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@TechConnectify congrats! we have indeed been following it, it was nice to see a set that makes you happy :D
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@TechConnectify I loved the comment about how nice it is to see grumpy dishwasher guy happy.
Did you see my suggestion about using a prism to display the spectrum in those LEDs?
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@TechConnectify Calling the light emitted from LEDs, to separate from incandescent bulbs, as "artificial" was chuckle-worthy.
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@TechConnectify I grew up with the C7/C9 bulbs and got them from TruTone as soon as you recommended them some years ago, and love them. Now I'm on the hunt for these!
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@TechConnectify woooooo!
one minor correction: LEDs don't produce monochromatic light. lasers do, because their coherent output results in a narrowband gaussian spectral power distribution (approaching the limits governed by spatial/temporal coherence as a result of uncertainty), whereas LEDs have a much more broadband SPD. it's certainly narrower than incandescent, much to your point, but it's not monochromatic (especially on optically pumped phosphor LEDs).
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@TechConnectify one of the reasons the blue LEDs look so absolutely eye-piercingly awful is that the quantum efficiency of that bandgap is suuuuuuuper high, so just a tiny bit of forward current gets you massive brightness. but the flipside of that is that pretty much all the white LEDs you love use exactly the same LEDs under the hood! they're just using that blue wavelength to optically pump phosphor to produce broadband white light. the tricky bit is not letting the blue leak through.
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@TechConnectify this is one of the reasons it's so tricky to produce high-brightness high-CRI low-CT (e.g. <3500K) LEDs. to get the low CT you need to cut the blue peak significantly, but since the blue light is what pumps the phosphor you can't mask it much without tanking the power efficiency (and increasing thermal load), plus you need to dope the materials just right to keep the SPD curve closely matching the point on the Planckian locus.
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@TechConnectify regarding the rectification, I'm kind of amazed that they got that bit wrong. I guess they're really cost-optimising the hell out of this stuff, but you can buy a mains 65W GaN USB charger for around $3.50/pc at qty10 on AliExpress these days (and it's actually pretty damn good - I've taken them apart and done the measurements) so it really does seem like they could do a proper AC-DC conversion here with some modernising of the electronics. easy to meet IEEE1789 no PSE risk spec.
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@TechConnectify (although come to think of it I wouldn't hold my breath on that front; my bet would be that these are being sourced as a white-labelled product from an OEM with customised glass, so they likely don't have the agency to change the power delivery electronics)
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@gsuberland @TechConnectify I did look at the website briefly and the totally over the top claims of in-house development and patents paired with the most bog-standard looks of the hardware immediately triggered my BS detector on Chinese bulk white labelling.
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@RichiH @gsuberland I had a conversation with the folks at Tru-Tone and... this is pretty much the only way to get Christmas lights made.
The reason the market sucks is that big box stores aren't speccing anything at all, they're just telling overseas manufacturers "sell us what you got" so the creative license is handed over to the OEMs who largely don't understand why anyone would want desaturated colors.
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@TechConnectify @gsuberland what specifically do you mean with "only way"? Manufacturing in Asia to maintain the 1000%+ margin, certainly.
It's not just speccing; for non-trivial stuff it's usually better to go on site and talk to the engineers leading production as the re-re-re-resellers lose too much information in their chain.
Agreed that taking some, just any, control over the resulting product will massively improve it - unless it's something that A Thing(TM) over there already.
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@TechConnectify @gsuberland I realized this could be read very negatively. I don't fault anyone doing things this way.
The strong claims around the lights being an original invention is what I find distasteful. In particular if anyone tries to patent the concept of colored plastic
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@gsuberland can you link to the „GaN“ USB-C wallwart teardown? I didn’t find it. I think we have the same and it’s Suspiciously lightweight.
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