Tom

Go to this link. I think it will help your design a lot.

I’m an engineer for a medical device company. I do a lot of work with machine vision (inspection during manufacturing). LED’s are used to illuminate images often, but usually the light source is very close to the object being imaged and the camera is very optimized for the light condition since we are usually taking the same picture over and over again. In the case of Beamer, you want a light that can illuminate anything. This is very challenging and you will need a lot of light intensity. This can be done with LED’s, but not with the approach you have taken. In industry, we use something called strobe controllers to do this. Most flash cameras use a similar approach.

You are going to have serious illumination issues with a single, constant-on, LED. LED’s can have a high intensity output if you give them enough current, but heat is the enemy of LED’s. To do it right, you will need to strobe the LED on and off with a high curent (you need a capacitor) and have a great heat sink at the LED. I would also say you need more LEDs, in general. Also, if you strobe the LED’s, you also have the syncronization issue that other influencers have talked about.

Good luck. It is a cool product idea.

And Jeremy, thanks for the tip! I’ll pass it along to our designers.