Discussing LED Light Fixture Optics With LEDiL

Introduction

Adam: This is the Wisconsin Lighting
Lab podcast, and I have a very special guest with me today. His name is Lauri,
with a company called Ledil. Ledil is a leader in the optical design space —
you guys have operations in both Finland and the USA and really do everything
from design to develop to manufacture optical systems for LED applications. To
get started, can you tell me a little bit more about what Ledil does, and your
background in the lighting industry?

Lauri: Like you said, Ledil is pretty
much a one-stop shop for LED optics. We're headquartered in Finland, founded in
2002. We have about 20 optical designers in Finland. We have manufacturing
capabilities in Europe in several locations, in Asia, and nowadays in the
States as well. We do have a sales office here in the Chicago area — that's
where I work out of. We have our tech support there, gonios, stuff like that.
So that's more to service the U.S. customers and help with technical support.

Adam: Awesome. And Lauri, you actually
started back in Finland on the shop floor, correct? And then you got into the
sales side eventually?

Lauri: Yes, the first thing I did was
in the lab actually. So any products we released, I was qualifying them —
making sure they were according to the spec. I spent a lot of my time in the
dark rooms with the gonios.

Adam: So you know the nitty-gritty
details of optics. And now your role — I know you just switched roles recently
— but your title is Technical Sales Manager for the North American region. What
does your day-to-day entail? Are you supporting your regional sales reps?

Lauri: It's about 50/50. We have a lot
of custom projects in the States, so I manage all of those. That takes maybe
half of my time. A lot of times I'm on the road — I work out of the plane, I
work out of the airport — traveling with Adam, who's our Midwest guy; Jeff on
the West Coast; Kevin on the East Coast; and our Key Account Manager Paul down
south. So I travel with them quite a bit.

Adam: Got it. When I first got into
the lighting side of our business, one of the things I learned very quickly is
that a major part of the value of a lighting fixture is the optical design.
With a lighting platform, some of the benefits of one fixture versus another
could be lumens per watt, could be quality, workmanship, engineering — but at
the end of the day, the fixture is designed to put foot-candles on a surface,
whether that's vertical or horizontal. And that's all optics.

Optical Materials

Adam: So as far as optics 101 — the
different materials, the different components of different platforms — what are
the major materials that you guys work with on the optical side?

Lauri: Our main three materials are
acrylic, which is our highest runner. We also do a little bit of polycarbonate
— in some countries, you might have specifications that actually call out for
polycarbonate instead of acrylic. And then we also do silicone optics. Silicone
is kind of the best of all worlds — best thermally, best against impact, and
also optically just as good as acrylic.

Adam: So when you think about the
hierarchy of optical materials, you would have polycarbonate at the bottom more
or less — and it depends on the application — acrylic would be a mid-grade
option, and then silicone would be the high end. Is that correct?

Lauri: All things considered, you
could definitely say that. Polycarbonate does have its upside — impact
protection, things like that — but it yellows easily, so for outdoor use it's
probably not the best option. Some manufacturers run high quantities of polycarbonate,
so they prefer to do it. It has a slightly different refractive index than
acrylic, so they might be more familiar with designing optics around that. But
just from an efficiency standpoint, acrylic is better than polycarbonate, and
it's somewhere on par with silicone — but silicone is more expensive.

Adam: It's more expensive, but it also
has some other upsides — it's easily sealable.

Lauri: Yeah, it's pretty much its own
gasket. You just need to add a frame to an optic and you can seal it. Out of
the three materials, it's the only one that's flexible and elastic.

Adam: The material that we've used
traditionally has been silicone. We do use some reflectors on a limited basis,
but we've had very, very good luck the last five years with silicone. There are
times — for some environments that are dusty and dirty — some people have
concerns with the tackiness of silicone, but we've never had any failures.
We've had really good luck. As the next wave of our designs, as we get into
more discrete options versus the traditional COBs, we're going to be looking at
acrylic options. Do you see trends in the industry with factories designing and
using one material versus the other, or is it really based on application?

Lauri: It's based on application, but
also based on the LED source you're going to use. If you're using mid-power
LEDs, 5050 LEDs, there's no reason at all why you would do silicone over
acrylic — it's just a waste of money, to be honest. If you're using COBs, you
have a good reason to use silicone. If you're using smaller LEDs, you're
spreading the heat out a little bit more, so you're totally fine going with
acrylic. It's usually the LED that dictates which material you want to go with.

The Role of Optics

Adam: Taking a step back — for someone
new to the industry, or new to selling our products, or even an engineering
team that's not familiar with LED engineering — what do optics do? What are the
fundamental reasons behind light fixtures using optics?

Lauri: The reason you would use an
optic is you're taking the light out of your LED source and putting it where it
belongs. For example, in a street lighting application, you want the light to
be on the street and to follow the street. That's what the optic does. Optics
can collimate light — if you want to light up a really tall column, you have to
reach the top of the column. You collimate the LED to make kind of a pencil
beam go up. So it's really guiding the light where it has to be. It doesn't
matter how efficient your fixture is if none of the light hits the ground and
is not usable light.

Adam: By efficient, you mean lumens
per watt?

Lauri: Exactly.

Sports Lighting

Adam: We've got a major focus right
now around sports lighting, and a lot of our growth and development is around
sports lighting products — which in terms of optics really puts the optical
design to the test. There are few applications that test the system more than
that. What do you see trend-wise, material-wise, design-wise within the sports
lighting space? If you're a sales rep, if you're an engineer, what types of
topics and things should people be thinking about and pitching to their
clients?

Lauri: I think glare is a big question
in sports lighting nowadays. There are a lot of designs out there that have
some kind of shielding to block uplight, for example. But if you really go down
to the design of the fixture, you want to avoid that — if you have an optic
that's good enough, you don't need that glare shield. There are different kinds
of optical patterns you can do where you can actually angle the fixture down
toward the ground a little more to cut down the uplight that way. So there's a
lot of experimenting with different kinds of beam patterns — not just straight
direct to the field, just forward throw — but freeform optics, things like
that.

Adam: On the sports side, we have a
system right now with our Helios product — we call it the Glare Killer. We use
a combination of a 20- or 30-degree beam angle, and we also have a visor system
that redirects spill light, turning it into usable light on the field. It also
blocks some of the line-of-sight glare. But what you're saying is, a lot of the
designs will get rid of reflectors altogether and use directional light. So how
do you manage the beam path? Because certainly if somebody gets in the line of
the beam, regardless of the optic, they're still going to have a glare issue.

Lauri: There's no way around that.
Wherever you're putting the light, the light has to go there — there's no way
to make turns with light. So if you're looking at the light source from that
direct angle, you're going to get glare. The goal for our applications team is
to spread out the light sources as much as possible. Ideally, you'd have
infinite light sources in all different directions, so you would only get glare
from one individual light source. That pretty much calls out for a laser beam —
you want as tight a beam as possible, because it's going to be harder to get
into the path of that light, into that high-intensity zone where you look at
the light and you actually get glare.

Lenses vs. Reflectors

Adam: Beyond optics — traditionally
with HID and fluorescent lighting they didn't use optics, they used reflectors
and diffusers. Beyond optics, what type of lighting distribution technologies
do you see people using?

Lauri: We actually usually talk about
optics including reflectors — it's within the same category. Any optical system
could be a reflector, it could be a lens. There are different kinds of lenses.
For example, this lens right here is what you would call a Fresnel lens — it's
a low-profile design, it has a Fresnel surface. These are pretty much circles
that collect the light and collimate it. What's more common in the LED world is
TIR lenses. If you look at the bottom side of this lens, you can see there's actually
a big cone here that collects all of the light. These are called TIR lenses,
which stands for Total Internal Reflection. That just means all of the light
out of the COB will pass through an optical surface, and all of that light is
controlled. If you compare that to a reflector — which you would see a lot in
traditional designs with HIDs — it's totally different, because a lot of the
light travels straight through the air; it doesn't touch the optical surface.
So that light is not controlled. You either have to have a massive reflector or
you have a lot of spill light. Lenses are lower profile, they control the light
better, and there's less spill light and less glare.

About Ledil

Adam: Let's take a step back and talk
a little bit about Ledil. You guys are based out of Finland — I know some of
our molds and some of our products come out of Denmark. Why is that part of the
world kind of experts in molding and optical design of these types of products?

Lauri: You probably know a company
called Lego. Denmark — they're pretty much experts in molding for decades. If
you look at Legos, the pieces from the sixties fit perfectly with the ones made
in 2010. So there's consistency. That's the reason you go there. It's a premium
compared to going to Asia, for sure, but if you have high-precision products
like the ones we use, you want to go somewhere like that.

Europe vs. U.S. Market

Adam: When we first started working
together a few years ago, you mentioned the differences between trends in
Europe and trends in North America. I've talked to other suppliers and people
we collaborate with, and they've mentioned how Europe seems to be three to four
years ahead of the U.S. in certain product lines. Do you think that's the case?
What are the major differences between the two markets, and in some product
categories?

Lauri: Probably, yeah. They seem to be
a little bit more innovative, or they test new things. It's easier to launch a
product in Europe — the regulations are less strict.

Adam: They're less strict in Europe?
Really?

Lauri: Yeah, think about UL, things
like that. There are different compliance bodies that make it easier for
factories to bring products to market.

Adam: Got it.

Lauri: So they release products way
faster. Sometimes they test the waters with kind of specialty products —
they're kind of funky in that sense. And they're also very focused on the
industrial design of a fixture, maybe a little more than here in the States. In
the States it's, you know, if it works, don't fix it — that's kind of the
mindset. But if you do launch something great in Europe, there's so much work
that goes into it — they test it thoroughly. In the States, people don't like
to release half-designed products. Whereas in Europe it's almost more of a
laboratory environment where people are willing to prototype, test the waters,
get feedback, and then once you have your higher-volume design, by that time
it's tried and true. What I also see a lot is, in Europe, companies tend to do
several different kinds of applications. Even one smaller lighting company
might do both area lights and downlights. In the States, it's pretty rare to do
that unless you're a big, big manufacturer. People seem to specialize more in
the U.S. within one product category. That might be just because Europe is a
lot of individual smaller countries — Finland might have 10 lighting
manufacturers, and there's enough space for all of them to do everything. In
the States, for a given application, you always have a couple of big guys that
really dominate.

Adam: That's a good comparison. I'm
sure there are things we can always learn from each market, and they can learn
from us. That's a good perspective.

Street & Roadway

Adam: Switching gears — we're entering
a pretty rapid product development phase at Wisconsin Lighting Lab and we're
collaborating a lot on the next generation of our designs. So what I want to do
is pick out a few different applications and, from your angle and perspective,
really understand what the most important components of each application are
from an optics standpoint. You talked a little bit about street and roadway —
we don't do a ton of street and roadway lighting — but what do you see as kind
of the baseline for optics for those types of jobs? If you're an architect, an
engineer, or a local sales rep trying to get a product specified, what are the
things you would look for in a factory or manufacturer?

Lauri: Street and roadway is a very,
very cost-sensitive market, obviously. If you look at a roadway fixture, the
wattages are so much lower than on an area light, so people don't really care
about the industrial design of that fixture necessarily. They can be pretty
simple — it's pure function, down and dirty. But optically, they still have to
perform really well, because you do need that uniformity and you do need good
light levels on the road — even more so than on a parking lot, because people
are driving 70 miles an hour.

Adam: Do you see a lot of Type 2 and
Type 3 distributions in that space? Do you see a lot of variation, or a lot of
standardization within Type 2 and Type 3 — Type 2 short, Type 3 short?

Lauri: Typically if you're doing Type
2 or Type 3, you would want to be a Type 3 medium or Type 2 medium. But it
depends on where you're installing as well. For example, Florida — they
actually use Type 4 in a lot of their roadway setups. So it has to do with the
distance of the lanes, the amount of lanes, whether it's staggered or just on
one side of the road, the pole height, and whether the fixture is going to be
angled or not. There are a lot of things that affect it, and a lot of
differences between different areas of the country.

Architectural & Decorative Outdoor

Adam: One of the product categories
I'm really excited about — and we're developing a number of products within
this space right now — is the outdoor architectural and decorative market. The
light pole component is important there, and being a light pole manufacturer
gives us an edge. But aesthetics matter too — not only the aesthetics around
the optics, but around the fixture itself. You've got some of the coach
designs, some of the modern lower-profile aesthetics. Optically within those
spaces, what do you see as important for architectural and decorative outdoor
projects?

Lauri: A lot of those products aren't
that strict with the beam pattern. So if you have to pick between the look of
the fixture and the beam pattern, you will probably pick a better-looking
fixture with a little less performance. But the end goal is the same — you want
good distributions. If you're doing a walkway, for example, you want a good
Type 2.

Adam: Pathway in a park.

Lauri: Yeah. A lot of those are Type 5
distributions — college campuses, things like that. So optically it's not as
strict as a roadway fixture, but obviously whenever you can, you try to get a
good beam.

Adam: Within those products I would
imagine diffuse lenses are used — other things to manage glare, recessed light
engines. Do you have any thoughts on that topic?

Lauri: There are quite a few ways you
can cut down the glare. Some designs hide the LEDs into the fixture and angle
them — they might not even use optics. Then there are fixtures that are a
little more performance-oriented; they might have performance optics, but then
put a diffused cover on it just to soften the beam. These poles are pretty low
to the ground, so you kind of want to avoid the glare if you can.

General Area Site Lighting

Adam: On a similar note, just general
area site lighting — shoeboxes, wall packs, area lights. I would imagine those
are a little closer to the roadway-type applications, although there is an
architectural component as well. So it might be a fusion of the outdoor
decorative and the roadway space.

Lauri: That's probably a pretty good
comparison. People aren't that concerned about glare — if you go to a Walmart
parking lot, they're glare bombs. But they do a good job providing good light
levels and uniformity on the parking lot, and that's what matters. But like you
said, there's definitely a design component to the look of the fixture. When
people go from that shoebox to LED, they definitely expect a sleek-looking
fixture that looks nice as well.

How Optical Design Has Evolved

Adam: How has optical design changed
the day-to-day for lighting applications people at factories? With HID
technology using reflectors, the distribution patterns were more limited than
with LED optics. What are best practices for applications teams, either at a
lighting agency or a factory? How do you think that's changed over time?

Lauri: For example, if you do a
parking lot — it's a retrofit project — it's pretty easy to match the beam
pattern that whole area was designed around with HID. So with an LED it's easy
to match that. But if you have a good optic that provides good uniformity, what
you can then do is lower the wattage, lower the power consumption, because
you'll have enough light just from the good optics — instead of blasting lots
of watts into the fixture. And if you're doing a new installation, you can
design your layout in a more flexible way. You can space the poles a little
further apart. If there's good backlight control with the LED optics, you can
be closer to buildings — potentially even limit glare shields or eliminate them
altogether.

Adam: Exactly.

Hazardous Locations

Adam: Do you guys do much development
around hazardous location products?

Lauri: Not terribly.

Adam: That's one of the spaces that,
over time, we would probably look at — it works well with our product line. We
do a lot of high-output stuff, we do some oil and gas business. Typically what
they call outside-the-fence, so it doesn't have to be explosion-proof, doesn't
have to be the different Class 1 Div 2 applications. But best practices,
optically, for hazardous-location jobs — do you have any thoughts on that?

Lauri: This is my impression, but I
think most of those are simple floodlights, and they're typically behind glass,
I believe. I've definitely seen some designs where it's a big glass optic in
front of a COB, for example, that might be exposed. But yeah, those designs are
pretty simple. People aren't concerned about glare or the look of the fixture.

Indoor Architectural Lighting

Adam: We don't do a lot of business in
the indoor architectural space, although in our current showroom and studio
here we did design some indoor architectural fixtures from scratch. I know you
spend a lot of time on the interior architectural products. Optics play a role,
diffuse lenses play a role. What does a typical product architecture look like,
optically, for indoor architectural jobs?

Lauri: Optically it could look very
limited. Historically, especially in North America, because of what people
perceive as glare — actually it's called pixelation, where you see the little
LED dots — people are very concerned about that, so they're trying to get rid
of it as much as possible just by diffusing the LED with some kind of plastic,
for example. But then there's no beam control. Obviously for some applications
it's perfectly fine — if you're just doing troffers in an office, it's a blob
of light, it'll work if you space it correctly. But we've investigated another
path to limiting glare. Instead of trying to hide the pixelation of the LED,
we're actually hiding the entire LED source behind a baffle. So we're cutting
down the beam angle so that there's no light on the high angles, but we also
have a baffle system. There are a lot of products coming out that are going to
follow that path rather than hiding pixelation. That has already happened in
Europe for a couple of years, and it's coming here.

Warehousing & High Bay

Adam: And then indoor warehousing,
industrial high bay, versus some of the interior stuff. With warehousing and
industrial products, some use optics, some don't, some use a diffuse lens. What
do you see factories doing from that standpoint?

Lauri: Mostly pretty simple products.
There are a lot of companies that do use optics, and a lot that are just fine
hiding the pixelation of the LEDs. But as opposed to office lighting, high bay
fixtures are higher up, so there's a big incentive in using optics — you can
use less wattage because you're actually putting more foot-candles on the
ground. So in high bay, people are using more optics than in office nowadays.

Office Lighting Trends

Adam: On the application side, any
other thing you want to note? Any applications you guys are excited about? What
spaces do you see a lot of development going into — not only at Ledil, but with
some of the other trends in the industry?

Lauri: I would say office lighting.
Like I said, linear fixtures with a baffled system instead of just hiding the
pixelation. That's where the market's headed.

Adam: It's funny — every time I fly in
an airplane at night, I look outside and it's just a sea of high-pressure
sodium streetlights with some LEDs as well, and I always think about that as
the addressable market, more from an outdoor company perspective. But I always
remind myself you can double that market size with all the stuff inside. In
places like Chicago and some of the larger cities, you think about all the
troffers and other interior fixtures in office buildings — it's a huge space.
And price-wise, from a competitive standpoint, that's a tough market to compete
in just based on volume. But it sounds like there are ways to differentiate
between some of the lower-cost products. What does that look like — is it all
optics, is it all design?

Lauri: Pretty much any LED troffer you
see is very similar. The only difference is pretty much the price tag on the
box, or maybe the drivers are a little different. So people are trying to break
out of that design style and try something completely new.

Adam: How much do you think the
interior market has been retrofitted at this point, from fluorescent to LED —
just a gut check? Is it 40%? I hear a lot of stats thrown out for the outdoor
market — around 10 to 15 percent of existing infrastructure has been upgraded
to LED. Is the indoor market ahead of that or behind?

Lauri: I think it's ahead. When you're
doing these large retrofit projects, you're retrofitting a whole city at the
same time. With indoor, isolated by building or even floor, it's a lot easier.
So I would say maybe it's 20 percent.

Adam: 20 percent — so still pretty
early on.

Lauri: Yeah.

Adam: Got you. I won't hold you to it.

LED Chip Technology: COB vs. Discrete

Adam: LED chip technology really goes
hand in hand with optics. We have traditionally used what's called a
chip-on-board design. There are benefits with the COB designs, and benefits
with discrete designs. What are the major benefit categories with each chip type
that you guys see?

Lauri: Let's start with COB. COB is
pretty much the most powerful light source available right now. It's
essentially taking all these LEDs and putting them into one little package.
This kind of a device has 10, 20, 30, 40 chips inside — so this one is as
powerful as a whole board. That gives you a lot of design flexibility — you can
push a lot of wattage and a lot of light into a small space. It's also quite a
robust package, so if you're not driving it at full current, it can take some
power surges. But optically, it's a little challenging because it's a lot of
light from one point source. Comparing discrete LEDs to the size and dimensions
of this light source, you need a much bigger optic to control it. So it's all
about finding that sweet spot — what's the correct size of a COB to use at what
point? At what point do you go to discrete LEDs on a board? But for any
high-output application, COBs are always going to be probably the most
cost-effective — if you don't have to have a board, you don't have to do a lot
of assembly work.

Adam: We do a lot in the 50,000 to
100,000 lumens space, and we've always gravitated toward the COB packages.
Quite frankly, we've had to fight a little bit of misinformation at times from
other companies that don't always speak highly of COB packages. Whether it's
sports or high mass, we've had very, very good luck in that space with those
chips. You mentioned that they're more robust, and I think that's absolutely
the case — we've had very, very limited issues with COBs. They seem to handle
power surges better than the discrete chips. As we start to do more development
around that 10,000 lumen to 50,000 lumen space, I think we'll start to use more
of the discrete packages, which allows for more optical control.

Lauri: That's true. And then what's
also driving it — you don't want to do a 50,000 lumen fixture and have one
single COB in the middle of it. It kind of looks funny.

Adam: Right.

Lauri: So you're trying to spread it
out, make it look a little bit more uniform.

Adam: When you say it looks funny, is
it just the one light source, or is there a limit? I know there's a limitation
from a beam pattern and distribution-type perspective. You've mentioned in the
past that architects and engineers seem to like the light source spread out a
little bit more evenly. Is there a term for that — is it more or less that they
want an even blanket of light sources versus one concentrated source?

Lauri: Right, that's correct. It also
comes down to glare. If you have, say, 15,000 lumens in this kind of size, and
then this is the same amount — if you spread that 15,000 over a larger area,
then when you look at it, it's going to be less glare.

Adam: Okay, that makes good sense.

Industry Trends

Adam: Other trends in the industry —
anything we didn't cover? What are you seeing out there in terms of optics, or
just in general? Could be optics, could be products people are getting into. I
know you guys are excited about the indoor space, but what else are you seeing?

Lauri: There are a lot of big moves
with companies. So it's going to be very interesting to see in the next couple
of years what it looks like.

Adam: Do you see a move within the
U.S. market toward more specialization — doubling down on the current model
where people specialize in each category? There are only a few companies that
can do everything well. So people are shifting their focus, trying to carve out
a niche?

Lauri: Yeah, they're trying to find
the thing that makes them special within an application.

Customer Support & Holistic Design

Adam: Definitely. If you're consulting
a sales team, an engineering team, or a marketing team within a particular
organization, what do you see as some of the most important focal points of
each crew? If you're a sales manager at a particular company, what are the
things you think people making buying decisions are really focusing on, from a
fixture-level standpoint — not necessarily optical level or component level?
What makes the most sense for customers? What are customers after?

Lauri: It's the whole package,
honestly. But a lot of times what people miss is the support. It depends on who
you sell to, but if you're doing small-scale sports jobs, those people don't
really know what they need. They know what they have, and they know it's not
good enough. That's when a proactive, supporting sales force is going to do a
very good job.

Adam: That's really what we try to do
— have not only the sales agencies that we sell through and other customers
that we work with support their internal staffs and applications teams, but
also really provide as much of an open door to our applications team as well.
There's an educational process. Once people do five sports jobs, once they do
10 high-mass jobs, it gets easy. But you have to have that support up front,
early on.

Lauri: And how often does the person
that's going to make the buying decision — how often have they done this
before? Never. So it can be pretty scary for them. Just walk them through it
with your support staff, and it'll be a lot more comfortable.

Adam: That's what we're really trying
to do with these podcasts. One of the observations I've made over the last few
years is how, at times, the technology people in the industry — the people who
design things at the component level — are pretty far removed from the end
markets. There are component companies that sell to OEMs, OEMs that sell to
other OEMs, and there are other people involved locally in the supply chain —
distributors, contractors, architects, lighting agencies. My hope is that with
some of these podcasts, where we interview and discuss things with our
component vendors, it helps educate really the whole industry, including the
people that are representing our products. I think more of that is needed — you
guys need to get more connected with people that are making specification and
buying decisions.

Lauri: That's exactly true. When we
design an optic, we don't just want to think about the optic. We think about it
first — make sure that it goes into a fixture and the whole thing makes sense.
Does the size make sense, do the beams make sense? But also the end application
where that fixture and lens is going. Do those two work for that end
application? So whenever we design a product, we try to think about our
customer and their end customer as well.

Adam: And we've learned a ton from you
guys. We've collaborated on a number of different optical designs, and we're
currently doing that as well. It's great to have that kind of push-pull — we
think we understand exactly what the markets want, and you guys understand the
physics behind it and what can be accomplished. I think it really results in a
good product.

Lauri: And also pushing each other.

Adam: Yeah. It's like, “what do you
mean you can't get a 10-degree beam pattern out of this optic? Just make it
happen.” But that's a lot of fun.

Off-Topic: Racing

Adam: So you're a car guy — we'll
switch topics a little bit. Formula One is big in Finland, correct? You've
produced a few champions over there.

Lauri: Yeah.

Adam: Why do you think so many car
guys get into the lighting industry? It seems like — is it just that you're
dealing with mechanical and electrical systems?

Lauri: Could be, yeah.

Adam: And you won a contest in Finland
for a racing simulation, right?

Lauri: Yeah, kind of like a PC game. I
used to race that. I think I was like 12 or 14. I did pretty well in the
Finnish league for that.

Adam: How many people were involved?

Lauri: I think it was like 15 to
20-something.

Adam: Nice. Do you have a video game
system now? Do you do some racing?

Lauri: Yeah, I try to drive at home
every now and then. I have a steering wheel and pedals and stuff like that. I
bought a table for it, but I have to get a better system.

Closing Thoughts

Adam: Cool. Well, what else do you
want to go through? Anything else the lighting world needs to know about?

Lauri: I think those are probably the
key things. If you think about optics, think about the end application, think
about the fixture design. There are so many ways you can go, so it can be very
challenging. Really starting at the end market, with the application in mind,
and thinking about the entire system when designing the product — versus trying
to retrofit components in existing platforms — that's the struggle. If you
start designing your fixture with a certain amount of watts in mind, or a
certain amount of lumens in mind, that could be challenging. What you really
want to do is look at the application you're designing the fixture for, what
the requirements are, what kind of beam pattern you want — and then you can
say, OK, here are the form factors and LEDs I'm going to play around with, what
makes the most sense. Instead of designing everything and then in the end
looking at optics, which is going to be a struggle.

Adam: Got to be a holistic approach to
the engineering. Alright, well, cool, man. I really enjoyed the discussion. I'm
sure we'll have you back at some point, but thanks for partnering with us.

Lauri: Thank you.