Our Project
Light of the World is an Electrical Engineering senior design project group at the University of Notre Dame for the 2012-2013 school year. Our goal is to create a prototype LED lightbulb that will be able to fit into a standard light socket. This prototype bulb has built-in wireless capability through which the user will be able to dim the light via an Android app from any location that has internet access.
Our project was motivated by the "green" initiative enacted by many companies in an attempt to reduce energy consumption. The common 60 watt incandescent light bulb lasts approximately 1,200 hours, while an equivalent LED (800 lumens) uses 6-8 watts and lasts approximately 50,000 hours. Incandescent lighting is still the predominant light source, however, mainly because it can be expensive to revamp an entire building’s lighting scheme.
Our goal is to create an efficient, cost-effective prototype LED lightbulb that could replace the traditional incandescent lightbulb. The design process was motivated primarily by functionality, but we paid special care to minimize costs whenever possible. Our LED bulb has a wifi module which communicates to our server and is able to be controlled either through a webpage on our server or by an Android app. The bulb itself is "plug-and-play;" simply plug it in to any standard light socket, download the app to your Android smartphone, and control the bulb(s) from anywhere -- even when you're on vacation! This functionality, combined with the tremendous energy savings of LED technology, makes our product fill a niche in both commercial and consumer markets.