World Lamp
Approx construction cost US$32
Low cost lighting when there's no mains supply available
The quest for a battery-powered lamp for lighting in poorer areas has presented an interesting and important design challenge for many years. Such a lamp should ideally be cheap, simple, efficient, and flexible - all at the same time.
With this in mind, the authors have designed a lamp which is made from inexpensive stock parts throughout, runs off a nominal 12V d.c. supply, and will power any ordinary fluorescent lamp between 100mW and 15W. It will power the equivalent of a 60W incandescent lamp for about 80 hours off a standard 12V car battery.
Most d.c.-powered fluorescent lamps use specialized components. While this may not pose a problem in major urban centres, it could pose serious supply problems in more remote areas of the world. The authors therefore searched for a means to unhook the World Lamp from the need for any uncommon or custom-made parts. This is accomplished in the present design through a.c. pulse-width modulation (p.w.m.), which is the core concept of the design.
More details on this construction project can be found in the June 2002 issue of EPE Online, the world's first web-delivered electronics and computing hobbyist magazine.
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