Modular Home Lighting

I meant to write this post awhile ago, and the ideas are a little disjoint, but I would like to get something out there.

Home lighting in developing countries is a huge economic bottleneck, too many households need to focus on solutions that are low cost in the short term, even though the long term costs are much higher, things like candles, kerosene lamps, or battery powered flashlights.  Any number of NGOs and for profits have worked to develop a range of lighting technologies that will help make the home lives of their users better.  One potentially new concept to promote these lighting technologies is designing a product that can be equally at home serving as the very first electric light-source that person has ever used or as the lighting solution of a modern home.  This can be done by rethinking the LED lighting solution, the vast majority of home LED solutions take advantage of the 100+ year old Edison screw design, this makes sense if you are utilizing older infrastructure, but we are in an era where design rules are changing and there are new connection standards that can make more sense, for example the USB 3.1 C standard.  This standard will soon be ubiquitous across almost the entire planet, and unlike the Edison screw, the voltage and amperage characteristics will be equally consistent from nation to nation.  Engineers could work to create lighting elements that distribute power via USB cables and connections types, and to avoid overloading the power distribution capabilities of the cables, bulbs could be designed to include simple communication protocols that would warn users of low power, excessive draw, etc...

11/16/15 my brain is a little disjoint right now but I wanted to get this idea down. Broad strokes, create an open standard that uses a smart connection type, it doesn't have to be USB 3.1C, but honestly it makes the most sense with that hole 100 watts of power transfer range and what not.  Lighting modules don't need to be exactly the same, but they should have some minimums, shared micro-controller standards, simple and standardized power requirements, easy thermal management, basically if lighting unit A is next to B in normal operating temps, they should stay fine, without any external cooling system, a way for bulbs to efficiently distribute power across bulbs, think femto electrical grids.

The entire rational of this design is that if a community invests in this lighting system, as money becomes more available they can improve their solution, going from small lamps to more traditional overhead lights, all while up-cycling the original components of the small lamp.

11/20/15

LED bottom

I finally made a proper initial render of what this lighting system could look like.  Both as a single light source and grouped together.  The 8 points on the bottom of the Sub lighting element are one approach to the lighting systems power and communication contacts, with a similar chip element to what is found in the thunderbolt connector type (found in devices like the iPhone) it won't matter which way the lighting element is plugged into its power supply, the lights will work)  On the top you have 7 LEDs they will provide light as well as a means of diagnoses, depending on how many LEDs are illuminated and in what pattern, users will have a means of determining where power issues are occurring, when a module is nearing the end of its life, or other information.  Aside from the full on and full off values, the bulb could potentially have over points of data that could be communicated, assuming you don't worry about rotational symmetry.

LED top.

 
As I refine this idea I can add more details, as well as better models.  The critical question is maximizing functionality while keeping per unit costs as low as possible.  Additional questions on thermal performance of the bulb configuration are worth investigating.

Multiple lighting elements grouped together/