2/3 Lamp Update

Hi everybody,
Here's this week's lamp update:

I. Meeting Summary:
Today Mike Dicenso joined us for the first time and told us about his idea to use a "shake light" type generator for the lamp powered by a foot pump. The engin 100 team actually initially wanted to have a foot pump design, but ended up going with the pedal design due to time constraints. This has the advantages that it probably would be easier to build than the pedal generator and could more easily be located in the operating room if the battery was running low during a surgery. The overall efficiency of this method and how well it scales up are unknown. We will be contacting an EECS prof. who is an expert on generators (and is currently teaching a generator class) to hear his advice. We also tested one of the LEDs that we got from ATC. Mike and Elliot's star-filled vision can testify to how bright they are. We just hooked it up to one of the power supplies in the project room. The LED has an angle of about 100 degrees so the spot size is much bigger than the 6" at 36" that we're looking for, but judging by how bright it is, 8 of them seem like they should be bright enough. If we do want to shrink the spot size, we'll have to design some kind of reflector assembly.

II. Action Items:
Elliot: Find FDA surgical lamp specs
Liz: Find out when the EECS prof is available and set up a meeting time
Mike D.: Post sketches of the shake light generator to the blog
Dan: Read over the material I sent you
Steve: Figure out what funding we have this semester

III. Next Week:
Our next meeting will be at our normal time, Tuesday at 8pm in the LBME project room (right after the M-HEAL general body meeting). First we'll start with a discussion of where we want the lamp to go from an implementation/business perspective. Then we'll break off into two groups with one group checking out the waveforms from the current generator prototype and one group starting to build a prototype lamp head with the new LEDs.

IV. Stuff Coming Up:
The lamp team will be presenting at the M-HEAL general body meeting two meetings from now. Development day is a day-long event where project teams set aside the day for M-HEAL in order to get a ton of work done. We keep you well fed, it's a good way to get to know other people in M-HEAL, and all the teams get a chance to get feedback from other M-HEAL members. Development day is scheduled for March 12th, so mark your calendars now. It will probably run from 10am to 7pm. The NCIIA grant proposal is due on May 6th. We've been competitive for this $20,000 grant in the past and have been told that with a more detailed business plan we should win it.

V. Brightness Units:
As per usual, we got tripped up by the proper units for describing how bright something is. Here's two wikipedia pages explaining how the units work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_(optics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometry

Don't forget to post the work from your action item on the blog. If you have any questions shoot me an email.

Steve