Vive La Résolution!
High resolution LED dimming is becoming commonplace. Unfortunately more bits don’t guarantee smooth fades. Here’s why.
Modular Vacuum Fixture
Our in-house designed Modular Vacuum Fixture (MVF) provides a porous surface flat to within a couple tenths (+/- 0.0002″), offers a clamping force exceeding 12 psi, and uses inexpensive sacrificial inserts that are easy to customize for specific tasks…
Tormach PCNC 770
ZulchLab projects have always involved hardware and software integration, but an increased focus on hardware design led us to bring prototype fabrication in-house. Starting in 2012 we established a prototype lab, including CNC machining, PCB fabrication, and casting...
Dimming Curve Abuse
Dimming curves can improve linearity, synchronize light output of disparate fixtures, compensate for non-linear inputs, or concentrate precise control over a narrow range. What they cannot do is everything at once. Trying to solve every aspect of lighting control with a dimming curve is a futile abuse of the mechanism.
Introducing Lumiglide™
Lumiglide is an improved method for LED dimming, utilizing signal processing techniques designed to accommodate the human visual system.
Dimming Backgrounder
Incandescent lamps have had a near-monopoly on illumination for a century so it’s not surprising that lighting control equipment has closely tracked the needs of hot tungsten over the same period. However LEDs have different requirements. Dimming incandescent lamps is...
Modulo Trouble
Simple problems in color science often involve tables of data and numerous calculations just to get back-of-the-envelope results…Excel is a fine tool for this kind of task. It handles tables well, easily shows intermediate results, and draws nice graphs on a whim. But there are some quirks, and it has a few issues with computation.
Quantifying Color
Color is an fascinating phenomena. It influences every sighted person despite having no physical existence. That makes it important. Our best science can neither measure nor manipulate its deeper subtleties, yet technology generates much of the color in our daily lives. That makes it interesting. Color is curiously consistent among people and oddly inconsistent across different environments. That makes it hard…
Creative Rhythm
The circle as symbol of the creative Rhythm from the conquest of illusion, J.J. Van Der Leeuw, 1928. My father was fond of this graphic and asked me to replicate it with a computer back in the 1980s. Dantz had recently acquired an original Apple LaserWriter which had...
A Blog Begins
Inventing is a deeply human activity that precedes recorded history and underlies most of our progress. Making something that fulfills the promise of imagination is so very gratifying, yet so very challenging. We conceive the possible and impossible alike, the...