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Update after a Month

2021. FEB. 14.

WOW. after a generally smooth kick-off, here are my first experiences, progress and feedback on the contents. Ex nihilo nihil fit


Evolving Meerkatblog

The loyal users and readers (there are already some - see later) surely noticed some major changes. Besides the premium quality small talks initiated after sharing the LED color mixing tool on LinkedIn, I also managed to acquire some really considerable feedback and to my surprise, lots of support - even from LED manufacturers, whose response was a bit fearful to me. It is always controversial to openly benchmark and compare products, even in case of objective parameters.

It's about 5-6 hours a week that I can invest into the blog right now. This month was about (as expected) managing the rush after going public. I'm trying to sum up hereby the most cruicial changes & improvements

Header

Some perv from Future Electronics told me that "Meerkat Tools" may refer to (for some) meerkat genitalia.. (oh crap, it's true). One has to listen and take efforts to prevent confusion these days. It makes me remember the time I've wanted to show classmates in mid school how ridicoulus shaved bears look like and made the compromising google search. Long story short, it's just plain "Calculators" from now on.

There is no more dropdown list since I'm anyways planning 20-30 tools for this site. I made a collection page for all. Will see how it works out. I really like the header photo there. Smooth.

Did a little tuning on the header jumbotrons. Will be a bit faster from now on.

Meta

You can now share the blog on social media! See below what to expect. This was done obviously in a rush, but still, quite OK IMHO. These updates will be shared this way - let's see how much it boosts those clicks. If cute meerkats are not selling, I dont know what would. I will go full bandwidth clickbait if I must ;)

SEO

Search engine optimization. It went quite fluent to my surprise. In the first week I was practically invisible in SEs. Then added magic header content and now We are second hit on 'meerkatblog'. I'm aiming to be first there and also want to reach first page on LED/Color/Mixing/Tool. Quite ambitious, right? Anyways, SEO experiences might become an unique post category in the future. The rule of the thumb as I was told is creating great content.

LED color Mixing

New LED models. Some backend tuning. Horticulture reference spectra. A grand horticulture module is coming soon.

LED calculator

A new tool here, yay! Since I already have a quite respectable database, I will not have the color mixing tool as a one trick pony of the lighting contents. LED Calculator lets You compare two LED systems of the meerkatblog database, side by side style.

LED Models and LedModels API

Added some new models. Mainly from Lumileds. Right now there are 352 different LED models (different spectra. LED characteristics are sometimes generic within a specific product line). I will add a lot more Lumileds LEDs soon. Those are great, because Lumileds keeps consistency spectra to spectra. Some explanation here: LED manufacturers separate die production and packaging (where phosphor is applied). Some Years ago it was only OSRAM to have all the dies production and also packaging in hand for every lighting product. All the others purchased at least a third of their dies from 3rd parties and often even from competitors. Now; a batch of die arrives in the packaging factory. Doping has its variances and thus peak spectra as well. Now phosphor molar recepies are not carved in stone. Like for a high CRI LED, 4-5 mixtures are applied. Color point is set on production line live and thereafer, the result is further (color) binned. Big times mess. FYI: check out the spectra of the measured and the catalogue CREE JK 3500K CRI90 LEDs. (measured has a 'measured' mark in the naming).. CRI 90 pass? pass! both 3500K? pass! Are the spectra similar? Not at all! I find it fascinating how human eye responds and resolves incoming VIS radiation. This is called metamerism (perceived matching of colors with different (nonmatching) spectral power distributions). Having a second tought now, this site makes little sense if it's true as is. :D Luckily though, the situation is not that bad. Spectra are more consistant than in this CREE case and for Lumileds, there is a very strict QC that ensures (more-or-less) spectral consistency. They are usually also a bit expensive therefore, to be fair.. Hence a marketing manager from Lumileds once told me that crappy salesmen sell cheap stuff for cheap customers. While I generally like any good challenge, could never turn a business with these products. Lighting is about being cheap unfortunately.

Anyways, We have new LED models and there are plenty more on the way. I've originally dumped all the models from the database to a JS object and fed to the color mixing tool, use as is. The package is currently 1.5Mb. If I end up updating and implement all the models I have on hand now, We will be at around 1000-1200 different spectra and 6Mb of raw data. With the new LED calculator tool, I'm trying a different approach, serving LED models on demand through an API. Which one's better depends really on user behaviour. More time spent on using the tools, the more rational it is to serve the whole DB on page load. So far 90% of my visitors spend less than 3 min on the calculator - that is probably because of the linkedin share, curiousity driven clicks - checked out, hummed and forget. Most the feedback I'm getting is about the tool being 'too technical'. I've started this all to serve a purpose for professionals and thus will probably focus on the ones understanding the intended use. But will see - I have to pay for database use at the end of the day alter all.

There will be a tutorial about the API. I got many requests for the database after release. Probably likewise engineers, having the underlying calculations and being curious about the models.. PLEASE DONT SAVE THEM ONE BY ONE! Your time is more valuable than that. In a nutshell:

  1. The complete database dump: /js/leddata.js
  2. The available LEDs list: /ledmodels
  3. Request an LED model by id: /ledmodel?id=...

Ramp up before scaling up

Oh boi! I've shared the link just two weeks ago. There is an internal log with NodeJS and also using google analytics. The latter is rubbish and will be removed next month for sure. it logs only about 1/50 of all access and even those are rarely informative. The reason behind is that modern browsers simply block it. So I'm gaining information about ppl using IE - that can't even run any of the tools. Jackpot! BTW, I have to do something with legacy IE users. At least some notification to remind them progressing sometime.

Back a bit @ google analytics. Out of the logged 100 calls, 23 are from US (I know really few Americans), 21 from Germany (I have some friends at OSRAM, probably shared internally, accessed (tried) with corporate IE) and 20 from Finland (!) What is in Helsinki and why are those poor guys using IE?!

some of the interesting cities logged, where I guess I dont know noone:

  1. Santiago de Compostela
  2. Amstelveen
  3. Baarle-Nassau
  4. Bad Homburg
  5. China

I wonder how they got here and what made them come back again.. I'll arm the commenting soon and will see if We can become a community.

Forward, always Forward

I wont have much time in 2021Q1 for sure. Planning only the completion of the existing two tools (release notes, bugfixing if needed..) and will add some new LED models. Then come the missing parts of the blog. Authentication, newsletter, commenting, spell checks on posts, search engine, linking, proper ux statistics.. I'd like to release LIDViewer around end of Q2. After that, the blog will become alive with regular posts, project schedule and all the goodies. The ESP32 CubeMX stuff and a horticulture lighting design tool will probably be out 2021 summertime.

Thanks everyone for all the support begotten so far!