I've been doing a little bit of reading on how glow-in-the-dark aftermarket gauges work for the dashboards of some cars (very similar to indiglo technology), and was wondering if the same principle might be applied to the buttons on the empeg.

It seems that a coat of conductive material is applied to a surface, and then covered again with an application of a protective material. Then, apply voltage and it lights up.

I find it very hard to believe that someone has not already created a spray-on application process for something like this yet, but I don't know of it (or how I would even search for the material). I would love to give it a shot, though...

heres some info on what you're after:

In reply to:

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Today, the most common luminescent product is Indiglo Night-light by Timex. This is a very safe method of lighting a watch dial. A watch battery supplies the energy to keep the dial lit. The substance used in Indiglo night-light is a mixture of ZnS and copper. A microchip converts an electrical charge from the watch battery to a higher voltage. This voltage is applied to the ZnS-Cu mixture, exciting the electrons. This microchip induces an alternating current that essentially turns the voltage on and off, allowing the electrons to return to the ground state. As electrons return to the ground state, energy is released in the form of light.

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So Indiglo is the product you're after - and its pretty nice looking light, but it needs a microprocessor or electronics to drive it. and the voltage may be higher than 5v

a Company called Lightsheet systems sells a solid sheet product called Light sheet which is basically small bendable sheets of Indiglo material.
You need a transformer to change the low voltage (3.3V in the empeg), to a higher voltage needed for the sheet to glow.

the big thing is that the sheet is cutable and bendable, so you could possibly cut the sheet into a area small enough to go under the buttons on the front panel - you'd still need to mount the transformer somewhere [inside the empeg].

Thanks so much for the information! Unfortunately, they don't have a website to speak of...

Now all I need is some clear buttons (I think someone made something of the sort a while back).

Also: as a general item, would anyone have an interest in purchasing these little gems if I were somehow able to create a kit to install them with minimal heartburn?

I'd definitely be interested. Been looking into solutions myself.

Me too, - but it would depend on the cost < $80USD per set and you might have a deal.

The only thing I don't know is how large the transformer that converts the low voltage DC to higher voltage AC is required.

There is a small possibility that the existing AC signal used to drive the VFD could be harnessed for this purpose - Rob [from Empeg] mentioned something like 60V (AC) is present on the display circuitry board which might be enough to drive a display board - but you might still want to be able to activate it only during the night to conserve the indiglo panels lifetime [see below].
If not, you'd have to use a small transformer & circuitry and then mount that inside the empeg so that its turned on when the headlights are (relatively easy to do)

This indiglo stuff is really really low-amperage - to give you an idea, down in New Zealand we use 240Volt AC.
You can buy small Indiglo based devices used for nightlights -[for anyone in NZ/Australia these are the HPM Moonglow devices] these are very simply a indiglo planel in plastic connected between the two AC power pins - the AC power drives the indiglo directly using the 50 Hertz AC signal for the on/off thats required (the indiglo panel works like a small light battery - it charges up the electrons (no glow) when the during one half of the AC sine wave when the power is on and the electrons emit light when the AC sine wave is in the other half-wave - so the panel actually turns on and off 50 times a second (for 50Hertz AC), and 60 times a second for 60Hertz AC) and the 240V for the voltage required to get the display planel to light.

They use something like 0.07 watts of power - you can work that out into something like 23 cents of electricty per year to run. [the device cost $14 in local currency and uses 23 cents of power].

This is a very simple and elegant device - [pity they only last for about 1000 'power on' hours before losing their brightness but thats another story!].

Now, to reason for this long dissertation - one day I as testing a solid state 240V relay using the panel as a signal for voltage on and voltage off as it was handy and less bulky than a regular lamp of similar.

But I was very surprised that the panel was dimly lighting even when the power was off [i.e. the solid state relay was not on].

This effect was due to the very tiny leakage current (micro-amps) that leaked through the solid state relay from the 'live' AC input to switched AC out through the light panel wnd flowed out through the other AC pin which wasn't switched..
So, they don't need much power to light up.

The only other comment I'd make about doing this, is that there will be some leakage of light from around the Right button into the regular display window area [the other 3 buttons are mostly surrounded by solid plastic that won't leak much light].

You could cover the light panel with paint to block this light leakage, or come up with some kind of shield to stop it being emitted through the front panel - it would be bright enough to be distracting I think if you didn't.

Or.. you can buy some glow-in-the-dark paint. I have some around the light switch in my room that's about 10 years old and I think it still works.

As far as the light "leakage" into the display panel, assuming that the indiglo sheet goes into the clear button, you can just use the 'ole magic marker to blacken the side of the button. This should limit leakage. The other thought is the color of the indiglo light. I've seen indiglo in two colors, a greenish and a blueish shade. Of course, I have a blue Mk2a, so I would want blue indiglo. But sign me up for a kit if the price is right.

I belive the color of indiglo is controlled by the frequency of the driver, often adjustable.

Actually, from what I read, this isn't the case. The color of indiglo is directly controlled by the dopants in the mixture. As stated on the site linked below, Copper and Chlorine makes blue, Copper and Aluminum makes Green and Copper, Chlorine and Managese makes yellow. You can have multiple color layers. And each layer would require it's own electrodes and it's own power source. You could then switch between the different colors.

http://van.hep.uiuc.edu/van/qa/section/Light_and_Sound/Making_Light/20010312181452.htm

Sounds remarkably complex to install in such a small piece of hardware...the site afmorementioned (Lightsheet) seems really cool, although they have no internet presence whatsoever. If anyone has any more information on them, please lemme know...!

OK, time for an experiment.

I hooked the secondary of a small power transformer up to the speaker outputs of an audio amp. The primary went to an indiglo nightlight and a scope.

Into the amp I fed the output of my notebook running a test tone generator.

This gave me a 10Hz to 20KHz, 0-330Vac source. (Much lower voltages at either end, the top limited by the low frequency transformer, the extreme lower by the amp.)

It worked! (I tried not to look surprised.) At the lower end the glow was quite deep green. As the frequency increased it went through cyan to deep blue. Most of the transition happened between 500Hz and 5KHz.

So, while the dopeant certainly controls the color, the frequency does have some impact too.

Getting back on topic, it appears both blue and green could be covered by the same buttons. I'm not saying that this is a *suitable* light source but there is room for tweaking it at least.

I emailled Lightsheet looking for some pricing and other info, they replied to me. Here is a summary:

They have 2 products now, lightsheet [what we talked about, and lightrope/stripe - basically a thin indiglo covered wire.
Lightsheet is about as thin as 2 sheets of paper, you can cut it to size and shape, or even put holes in it and the light output is not affected - the whole sheet glows evenly. It has two main colours, White and Blue.

You can order the sheets/ropes in various colors and the transformer you need to run them is quite small [as small as .9 inch by .7 inch by .5 inch] and runs off a 9 volts power source [e.g. 9V battery] and costs between $10 and $20 USD for the Xformer, which can run more than 1 sheet.

The sheet is less than $USD5 per square inch on average [gets a lot cheaper the more inches you buy in the one sheet, smallest is .25 square inches for $2.75].
The Rope/Stripe is $2.75 per foot with 1/2 a foot increments.

The Light sheet/rope is rated at 5000 'power on' hours - which if its used only at night would mean a lifetime, or about 9 months of 24 a day continuous use.

Heres some contact info from their PDFs they sent me:

Order by phone, C.O.D.

Call us at 603-595-7146, 24 hours a day,

seven days a week. Or, fax us at 603-595-9609. 



How to order:

LightSheet Systems 319 Main Dunstable Road Nashua NH 03062-1906

603-595-7146 FAX 603-595-9609 [email protected]

Order by phone with your credit card.

Call us at 603-595-7146 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

They do international orders too.

So, sounds like a intersting idea, you could mount the small Xformer inside your empeg if you only had one disk installed, there may not be room with two drives installed. You would wire the Xformer to your cars 'Headlights' on input on the docking connector inside the Empeg so its only powered at night and you could use a small regulator to ensure only 9 volts is output to the Xformer.

Very do-able, now all we need are [more] transparent buttons than the grey ones we have now.

I can imagine BTW some of the uses this stuff would have outside of your Empeg - must be 1001 projects this stuff is good for.

Who is in possession of the clear buttons, anyway? How were they manufactured?

This has so many uses in the car alone. I'd love it to change the color of some of the buttons in my car so they can match everything else. I just bought an reverse indiglo gauge cluster to match the color of my MK2a and Blaupunkt head unit. The rest of the buttons in my car are orange though, so I might be able to change them using this sheet or rope indiglo. This is a phenominal product.

you could mount the small Xformer inside your empeg

Well... maybe. Probably. When you say transformer I am assuming that there is an inverter and some A/C current involved somewhere along the way. I would want to be very sure that that A/C wasn't setting up any interference inside the empeg that could introduce signal noise into the output.

tanstaafl.

They use something like 0.07 watts of power - you can work that out into something like 23 cents of electricty per year to run.

Is electricity that expensive in New Zealand?

At .07 watts, it would take you 14,286 hours, or 1.63 years to use one kilowatt-hour of electricity. Therefore, you would use .613 KWH in one year.

If it costs you 23 cents per year to run the light, then .613 KWH costs 23 cents. That works out to 37.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is anywhere from three to ten times the going rate for electricity in the U.S.

What does electricity cost per kilowatt-hour in other parts of the world?

tanstaafl.

Doug...

You know how, in this country, they do background checks and don't let certain people own guns? Well, you shouldn't be allowed to use math. It's just too dangerous in your hands.

"Use a formula, go to prison".

Electricity costs about 10 cents per KwH in local currency, thats about 4 cents US per KwH and thats mostly generated from renewable energy sources [like Hydro, some Wind].
We don't have any Nuclear power plants.

The cost about 23 cents was from the 'promotional guff' the manufacturer put on the packaging.
Not sure how they calculated it, maybe there is some kind of power factor involved.

My point was that the device cost far more the buy than cost of the power it used.

That goes without saying.
They don't say what the 'AC voltage' is, it must be pretty high
[or sucks a lot of milliamps], as the biggest Xformers can pull up to 750 mA if you have enough LightSheet/Rope attached.
At 9 Volts, that a few watts.

The AC induced noise could get worse if you made it pulse on and off with the sound. If its was lit stedily it would be less of a problem I think.

"If its was lit stedily it would be less of a problem I think."

Well, you may notice it less but it'd still be there, just on a steady frequency.

I think it would be as useful, if not more so, for someone to make an indiglo remote.

The front buttons are easy to find in the dark, but the remote requires that you "grope for the nipple" (Fabris, 2000) to determine the correct orientation, then count in the correct grid reference from top-left, or bottom-left an axis at a time to locate the correct button in the dark.

Indiglo might be the perfect material to illuminate the remote, it must be possible with a cell battery as Timex use it in their Indiglo range of watches. I suspect that a sheet as large as the remote would use rather more energy, but I could cope with changing the battery regularly for the convenience in the car, or even a cigarette lighter adapter for it.

Wow, that would be the ultimate. Backlit buttons on the empeg, and an indiglo remote.

Did I really say "grope for the nipple"?

i couldn't find any "groping", but you did call it a nipple in this post.

You implied the need to finger a nipple.

Calvin

Actually, that doesn't even need to be implied, that's just assumed.

I'd be willing to get in on the Indiglo buttons if it was done.

I have found the relevant email, and no, you don't say 'grope for the nipple', but you do mention groping the bottom of the remote, and feeling for the emmiter.

For everyone's amusement I hope you don't mind me including this extract from an email to the alpha team from 4th April 2000:

"You guys are right about the battery hatch/IR window being one way to
recognize the direction of the remote, but it's unnatural to have to
do that. My point is that many (most?) remotes deliberately use a
button layout that is asymmetrical along at least one axis, and they
do it for good reason. It's natural to recognize the button layout by
feel because it has a direct correlation to the visual button layout-
it's a hard link to the human visual cortex. It's not natural to have
to grope the bottom of the remote or feel for the emitter. You have to
actually THINK about it when you're groping for the battery hatch,
whereas an asymmetrical button layout would work naturally without any
thinking."

Groping for an asymmetrical nipple is even more interesting.

Whatever floats yer boat