An introduction to our lamps…

It began about 18 months ago. Initially I was curious about driving white LED’s because I had a project to create some garden lighting using COB LED filaments.

Don’t worry about all the tech terms, I intend to explain all of this in coming posts and you can get a much better idea. Alternatively, you can skip the technical discussions because in between there will be lots to see and read about how we’ve designed this range.

Those garden lights were called “Phobos-K”. They still light up our garden paths and remind me whenever I come home of where I started with all this. My natural inclination with any project is to start throwing more ideas around and working out new projects and possibilities. Very quickly the question of solar powering the lights arose. How do you store and regulate the available solar power? Suddenly questions of charging batteries and driving strings of LEDs had to be answered. Some simple prototype boards for charging a battery and driving white LEDs followed.

The little prototypes wanted to become some sort of nightlight, the garden lights faded from my immediate interest. At the same point in time, Bored Owl started building up a collection of 3D printers and learning to design and print product prototypes started to take over from the electronic work I was doing.

If you look at the garden lamp designs below, the parts are 3D printed with glass and PVC components incorporated as well.

Some ideas flowed, and then the project stalled. Quite a few months later, I took up the effort again and designed a producible charger and LED controller PCB based on the earlier prototypes. A proper housing was designed and printed and the “Hikari” lamp was born. We made some quantity of these and gained a lot of experience - enough encouragement to design a second version that was modular and could be customised by the customer.

Our Hikari became Hikari-2 and now “BabyKari”, “Andon” and “Ushu”. Our blog will talk about adventure designing and making these lights…

What came before: Garden Lights

The history of Hikari is incomplete without these garden lights. Although they have never become a staple product for us, what we did build was a starting point for our first proper products.

For more than thirty years, I have been designing and building electronic products - mostly for industrial use. The first twenty years of that time I was involved in every aspect of the product life from cencept to design, testing, production and even field service. The last twelve (before founding Bored Owl) were software focussed where I did little electronic design.

As founding the new business became a more concrete idea, I started to exercise my experience making electronic things.

In those previous experiences, making the mechanical components of a product was an area where more money and time was required (compared to the initial electronic design work). Tooling and testing 30 years ago was much more expensive and time consuming. At the time I entered the last twelve years, many of my designs were being molded from low cost poly-urethane resins in molds milled on a small CNC machine - things were beginning to change.

The garden lights (we dubbed “Phobos”) were an exercise in using the new 3D printing machines combined with a relatively simple circuit to make a lamp housing that could be reliably used outdoors.