Light Minds Think Alike

Which Pizza would you prefer?

We held a celebration of the Selador integration in to ETC yesterday. Everyone got free Pizza and a chance to look at the new fixtures and understand the technology and what makes them different. Fred had the idea for a pizza display using an RGB fixture and a Selador fixture.  Brilliant! Which Pizza looks most appealing to you?

What could the Economic Stimulus Package mean to you?

While watching President Obama's speech last week, I noticed that most people in the room, including the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, had a small brochure they were reviewing while Obama was speaking.  I have my own opinions about keep handouts in the box until the end of the presentation, but seeing those 'guides to the stimulus package' cheat sheets made me realize something: there is a plan.  I thought about the scope of the plan, what rumors I've heard in the news, and my thoughts went immediately to 'how could our reps and dealers, and ultimately ETC look for opportunities to based on the projects created by the Obama plan?

Now, this is just my opinion, but I am willing to bet that there are projects in every state that will require our products - we have had a few inquires from different facilities who think they are slated to get money- and they were asking what they should budget for.  There are plenty of potential projects that ETC might not make products for, but there could be countless opportunities for other products our reps and dealers offer.  There might also be unrealized projects that could drive you to create a new business opportunity later- who knows, but it's worth a shot, isn't it?  In these tough times, let's find every piece of new business we can- every little bit drives the economy forward!

I realized quickly that this information must be published somewhere, but I did not know even where to begin, so I asked our resident political watchdog, Joe Kirschling.  Not surprisingly, Joe had a backlog of emails he'd been exchanging with other resources about this very subject.  Joe was kind enough to not only send me several very interesting website links, including one to the Federal site detailing the plan, but Joe also took a few minutes to summarize several key points, and provide additional information about where people in each state can find out more, and even how you can contact your Senators and Representatives.

In addition to the information Joe wrote, he included Links to several sites that offer independent lists of project by state, that local governments have proposed to make use of the incoming federal money.  While most are infrastructure projects like roadways, bridges, etc. - leave no stone unturned.  

Here is what Joe had to say (with a few insertions of my own):

“A crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind”  - Chinese proverb

 As funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act starts to flow to federal projects and state budgets, we can find opportunities for product sales by staying aware of projects and industries that are targeted for funding from the new law.

 In President Obama’s address to congress on February 24^th, 2009, he outlined his intentions for increased funding in three major areas: energy, health care, and education.  All three of these areas represent opportunities for sales. 

Energy – energy efficiency and conservation  is a key component of the administration’s energy policy, Paradigm does this well.  Capitalize on it. (e.g. energy efficiency initiatives at the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration)

 (Many of these facilities are in need of new lighting systems, and likely new energy management systems, to qualify for the most budget. There will be many, many facilities built in the 80's and 90's looking to upgrade their electrical lighting systems, install daylight harvesting systems, and more - and Unison Paradigm, SmartSwtich paired with the SmartLink Timeclock, other products you might represent are a very necessary part of this need!)

 Health care – funding for health care means increased budgets and profits for hospitals and public health institutions (e.g. National Institutes of Health [NIH], Centers for Disease Control [CDC], and the Public Health Service).

Education – the commitment to increased funding for K-12 instruction as well as the push for all Americans to seek higher education with help from government funding, public and charter schools, community, technical, and junior colleges, and colleges and universities across the nation will see their budgets and building projects increase.  Each of these venues includes opportunity for our products to be placed.

 The administration has started an unprecedented policy of openness and accountability in conjunction with this law, which translates to increased access to information about how, when, and where all of the money is being spent.  You can find information on specific federal government projects by going to www.recovery.gov.

 In addition, much of the funding will be sent directly to the individual states intended for general areas of state government use rather than specific projects.  For information on what projects within your state will be funded by this money, stay in close contact with the office of your governor, your state’s departments of Education, Energy, and Health Services.  While some of this information will be available at www.recovery.gov, your state departments will likely be able to offer more specific details about projects that will benefit from the new funding.  Also, contacting your senators and congressperson directly about what money will be available for which projects in your state is another fruitful route, as such officeholders are frequently anxious to boast about project expenditures for their constituencies.

 (A list of the projects that have been submitted during the recent national meetings of mayors can be found here. Several states have their own 'recovery tracking site' found here.)

To contact your congressperson, go to www.house.gov and you can find your representative by typing your zip code in the field at the top of the home page.  By clicking on the search result, you will be directed to the official’s website.

 To contact your senators, go to www.senate.gov and find both of your senators by selecting your state in the “Find Your Senators” field at top right on the home page.  The senators’ homepages will be in the search results.

(GET CREATIVE!  THERE IS WORK OUT THERE! GOOD LUCK!)

 P.S.   An interesting list of other projects, which some think are wasteful, but may be of interest to many of us in this business can be found here.  Finally, there is an interesting chart attached to this post (from recovery.gov) illustrating 'where the money is going'.

The CUBS and Teamwork in ETC Service

There is a yearly ritual that takes place in the ETC Service Department. It usually happens in late February and involves a great deal of planning, coordination and teamwork. The event: Trying to buy home game tickets for Chicago Cubs Baseball games. (Yes I know, we live in Middleton, WI)

Lisa Chapiewsky has been the Field Service Coordinator for ETC Inc for about 9 years and she is a rabid Cubs fan. For those of you that do not know, the Field Service Coordinator is the one person behind the scenes in Field Service that holds the fate of all installation and field service work in their hands. If you have a new ETC system and need to get it up and running, Lisa is the one that finds the right person for the job. I had the pleasure of being the one to hire Lisa back in 2000 and have missed the opportunity over the last 4 years to be involved in her quest to obtain Cubs tickets.

So how it works: On the morning of February 20th, Lisa shows up at work in her Cubs sweatshirt and a stack of paperwork. This paperwork details all her preferences for game days and seating areas. At around 9:00 am she solicits everyone in the Service department to log onto the ticket page for the Cubs. You basically log into a ‘waiting room’ and hope that the system randomly selects you to buy tickets. Over my first 3-years of doing this I never got to the screen to buy a ticket but was surprised to be the first person in the department to get in once selection started at 10:00 am CST. (I got in at 10:20). I was in a discussion with Matt Kerr from Phone Support when the window opened. I stopped talking mid-sentence, ran to my door and yelled “Lisa, I’m in!”…At this point Lisa runs over with paperwork and credit card in hand. She goes though the screens and gets tickets. She then logs me back into the waiting room. During the day you randomly hear people yelling “Lisa, I’m in!” followed by Lisa running through the department with her credit card.

This year seemed to be quite good as she got all her tickets by 1:00 pm. I was lucky enough to get into the system a second time and felt happy to be helping a former employee and current friend.

It’s all about the Teamwork!

Jetlagged and in Middleton for the week...Mike Meskill

Welcome Selador to ETC - a new home for the x7 color system

My name is Rob Gerlach.  I am one of the co-founders of Selador.  Today we announced that ETC has acquired the Selador LED product line.  This is, of course, a really big day for me and fellow co-founder Novella Smith, but I think it’s also a big day for our industry.  Things are going to change a lot because of this.  That sounds like a PR-approved message, but I truly believe it.

We all know that LEDs are all over the place.  Go to any trade show, and you’re bombarded by them, and I get as sick of the hype as anyone else.  Yes, they’re a great technology.  The power savings and longevity and durability they can achieve are in a whole different league than conventional lighting.  But in my mind, these benefits kind of miss the point.  For me, the truly wonderful thing about LEDs is that they are absolutely beautiful little light sources that can do things that no other lights in the world can do. 

This inherent beauty is what drew me to LEDs in the first place.  I wasn’t a lighting person before starting Selador, but when I saw how LED technology was changing about 10 years ago, I became obsessed by it.  LED color is spectacular.  It’s deep and vibrant and controllable with a level of precision that designers could only ever dream of.  To see the difference between LED color and color from a standard source with a saturated gel, look at the following two graphs. If you have a lighting background you will easily recognize the visible spectrum of light within these graphs with Violet at the far left and Red at the far right.

You’ll see that not only does LED color have a much narrower spectral footprint, it is also more cleanly defined.  Where many gels will have multiple peaks of color of various widths at various points in the spectrum, LED color always has just a single, narrow peak at its dominant wavelength.  On its own, this characteristic is neither inherently good nor bad.  The trick is that in order to be really useful, especially when adding multiple LED colors together, this color has to be managed in the right way. 

There are shortcuts to color mixing.  Red, green, and blue (RGB) can get us kind of close, and this approach is fine for many applications, but it’s a weak substitute for real color control in those situations where the quality of light is critical.  Here are some more graphs:

Some marketing materials like to throw around the term “Full Spectrum” when talking about color-mixing LED luminaires.  Clearly from the above graphs, it can be seen that color-mixing LED fixtures are not full-spectrum sources, particularly RGB fixtures.  Even with the seven colors we use in the x7 color system, there are peaks and valleys.  The x7 approach has far more spectral content to work with which is one of the big advantages. I think it is unlikely that a color-mixing LED fixture will ever produce light that exactly matches sunlight’s spectral power distribution (sunlight is a truly full-spectrum source.)  However, with the proper management of the various colors in the mix and their brightness relative to one another, the output can be made close enough to full-spectrum to be broadly useful and very beautiful.

Many people have seen these next two diagrams.  The first diagram at the right shows the color capabilities of a typical RGB fixture.  When you only have three points of color within an additive color-mixing fixture, the range of color that the fixture can produce can be defined by plotting the three colors on a chromaticity diagram and connecting the dots.  Everything within the connected dots is that fixture’s color gamut. 

The second diagram shows the Selador x7 system color gamut.

With seven points of color, the fixture’s color gamut covers a much larger part of the chromaticity diagram.  After years of research, Selador was able to show that the more colors there are in an LED light source, the more saturated and vibrant the color mixes are.  We also showed that this multi  -color approach produces the most satisfying, natural-looking white light and soft pastels, particularly when illuminating people and objects.  In order to make skin tones and colored objects render correctly, you need lots of points of color within the color mix—basically you want to reduce the magnitude of the peaks and valleys in the spectral makeup, smoothing them out somewhat by adding more colors across the spectrum, and match the spectral power distribution of sunlight as much as possible.  Without this, LED fixtures don’t work very well in conventional illumination functions.  RGB light does very odd things to skin.  It always produces pink / ruddy or greenish-gray skin on people, which I imagine is not generally a desirable thing.  Colored objects under RGB light look unnaturally red or green or blue—the objects’ colors are hyper-real and difficult to tell apart from one another.  Hence Selador’s unique seven-color system.  It’s the only way I’ve ever found to get LED-based lighting that is predictable and intuitive, that does natural things to people and objects, and that doesn’t have that obvious, electronic look to it that I despise.  It is also very rich and appealing to the human visual system, which over time has evolved to be deeply connected with the full-spectrum light we see each day from the sun.

There are other components of Selador fixtures that are critical for them to look natural to the eye and seamless next to conventional fixtures in a rig.  Selador fixtures have newly redesigned circuitry within them that allows for exceptionally smooth, analog-looking dimming.  I have to say that this was surprisingly difficult to achieve with a light source as responsive and non-analog as an LED, but I am extremely pleased with the results.  Selador is also known for terrific beam-shaping capabilities.  No, we don’t yet have a Selador ellipsoidal (it will come) but the fixtures we do have can be shaped very nicely with specialized secondary lenses.  We get a lot of compliments about this.

Among a whole list of things, ETC brings to the table a ready-made world of control.  I know that seven-color mixing can be daunting.  Within an ETC system, it’s all simplified.  ETC makes Selador color mixing quick, intuitive, and predictable.  In fact the latest software for the Eos and Congo control systems already allow designers to control the Selador fixtures by calling up gel colors. The fixture libraries in these systems are calibrating and I have to admit the color matches are very good. I’ll discuss this in more detail in a later entry.  I’m pretty excited about it.

There are many more things we plan to do.  With ETC taking over, our combined efforts can now produce new products and introduce enhancements that have been on the drawing boards for a long time.  There is exciting stuff in the pipeline, and I’m very happy that I get to be a part of the development team at ETC for new Selador series products.  More to come. . .

On originals vs. copies

"Shouldn’t copying something be easier than creating it? Someone else already did the work, right? The problem is that the work on the original is invisible. The copier doesn’t know why it looks the way it looks or feels the way it feels or reads the way it reads. The copied interface is a faux finish."

- Why You Shouldn't Copy Us or Anyone Else, Signal vs. Noise blog (yes, I do see some irony to quoting a commentary on not copying)