Let’s build a our own LED flashlight lantern night light

LED technology is amazing, these tiny electrical circuits produce very strong light with only a small amount of electricity. LED flashlights can shine white light very brightly in a straight line which is helpful when searching or walking in the dark. However, there are times when a direct beam of light can make seeing in the dark actually difficult because areas in the light beam are bright while areas outside the beam are dark.

Diffuse light reaching in many directions can make seeing more areas easier in the dark since more light is scattered with less intensity. That’s why common light bulbs are made with translucent glass or plastic surrounding the light source. When light is emitted from the LED, or tungsten wire in other bulbs, it hits the translucent material and scatters in all directions making the bulb appear to “glow” instead of shooting a beam of powerful light.

So, let’s use our knowledge of transparent and translucent materials to create a night light using only a small LED flashlight, glass or plastic bottle, white glue, a small piece of aluminum foil, small piece of clear plastic wrap, and tape.

Clean a small bottle, it can be a glass or plastic bottle, with soap and water and remove the label from the outside. Hot soapy water works great to get the label and glue off the bottle. Cut a small piece of aluminum foil that’s the size of the bottom of the bottle. Then cut a small piece of clear plastic wrap that will cover the opening of the bottle.

Fill the bottle with water and add 3-4 drops of white glue. Shake the bottle until the water appears “milky” or “cloudy”. The glue will make the water translucent so light beams will scatter in all directions when the flashlight is shined into the bottle. Cover the opening of the bottle with the clear plastic wrap and gently insert the flashlight into the bottle. The plastic wrap will protect the flashlight from getting wet and seal the bottle to prevent the water from spilling. Use tape to set the flashlight in place and seal off the opening of the bottle. put another way 500 Megapixels (500Mgp). See how the different lights mix to create even more colors? What color do we get if we mix all the colors of light together?

Turn the flashlight on and see how bright your night light glows! You can experiment with adding a drop of food coloring to water and change the color of night light. You can also try adding glitter to the water and watch as the small reflective particles scatter the light even greater and the bottle not only glows but shines light like a “disco ball”!

What is color? This depends on whether we are talking about light or about pigments. Light as a form of energy has many different wavelengths, there are only seven wavelengths that our eyes are able to see, these are the colors in a rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Infrared light is produced by heat, which we can’t see, but many insects like mosquitoes and some reptiles like snakes can see this color.

Image of a girl seen through infrared.

What a mouse looks like in the dark, to a rattle snake that can see the infrared heat of its body.

Look at this image close up, what do you see? Now move far away form the image, now what do you see? This is how your brain makes sense of pixels, the smaller the pixels the greater the detail of the image.

Ultra violet is a high energy wavelength of light we cannot see either, but many insects like bees and birds like American Kestrels can see this color.

We see a starling with white light on the left, how birds see the UV colors of each other on the right.

Pigments are paints or inks that have unique colors. We see the different colors because the material that makes up ink or paint absorbs the colors of light except the reflect of the color we see. For example, if we see someone wearing a red shirt, the pigment in the shirt is absorbing all the other colors of light, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, but Reflecting Red.

When lights of different wavelengths mix we see a huge amount of different shades of color. The amazing thing about light is with red light, green light and blue light, we can create any combination of color and image. This is how we use current screens, they’re called RGB screens, Red, Green, Blue. It’s by increasing the number of tiny RGB light sources (pixels) that we can create images with so much detail it’s becoming very difficult to tell the difference between an image and something that is real! This phenomena is called resolution, the human eye can see over 500 million pixels or

So when we paint a picture, we’re mixing materials that are absorbing some colors of light and reflecting other colors. This means that when the pigment in paints we mix, they are absorbing each other’s light colors.

We need to be careful how we mix pigments because if the pigments are absorbing each other’s light, what do you think will happen if we mix all the different colors of paint together?