LEDs and the Airport Express: Technologies That Change Everything

Abstract

WITHIN FIVE years, you won't be buy-ing incandescent light bulbs. Instead of inefficient incandescent bulbs that get hot -- thus wasting a lot of electricity -- you will buy cool-to-the-touch LEDs (light emitting diodes). If you pay attention when you're driving, chances are you will see LED traffic lights. They are the ones that look like an array of smaller light bulbs -- which, in fact, they are. You might also notice that most school buses now have a pair of LED stoplights. Why LEDs? First, since LEDs produce almost no heat, they are very energy efficient -- using less than 10% of the electricity of an incandescent bulb. Second, LEDs have a lifetime of several hundred thousand hours, which prompts many manufacturers to warrant them for a lifetime. A flashlight I recently purchased illustrates the difference between incandescent and LED bulbs. The three-C-cell flashlight has a halogen bulb surrounded by an array of three LEDs. The halogen bulb will run one to three hours on a set of batteries; the LEDs will run 300 hours! I bought the flashlight for my car's glove box because it is so battery friendly. Admittedly, $50 or $60 is a lot for a flashlight, but imagine how many sets of batteries I won't have to buy. LED lighting is especially well suited for use in outdoor and marine environments. I boat in salt water, and over the years I have had a constant problem with my navigation lights. Salt is a natural enemy of the steel used in incandescent bulbs and their receptacles. I now have plastic-encased area lights and running lights that are guaranteed for a lifetime. Problem solved. Until recently LEDs came in colors, but not in white. What were sold as white LEDs had a distinct blue tint. Things are improving, and nearly pure white LEDs are now available. Of course, many applications like stoplights require colors anyway. Today, replacing a 30- to 60-watt incandescent bulb with an LED bulb is quite expensive -- in the range of $40 to $200. Night lights and accent lights are more reasonably priced at about $20 to $30. Experts are predicting a rapid decline in these prices. If every household switched from incandescent to LED lighting, the estimated energy saving would be between 10% and 20%. If I were a stock market investor, I would quickly put some funds in a manufacturer of LED home lighting products. The second technology that changes everything is Apple's new Airport Express wireless Ethernet base station. Airport Express weighs less than seven ounces; operates at 54 mbps (megabits per second), which is the fastest wireless Ethernet standard; and has an Ethernet networking port, a USB 2 port for printer sharing, and an analog/digital audio port. The feature that makes the Airport Express so ground breaking, however, is the audio port that lets you beam stereo to the Airport Express wirelessly. …