I made this light to read books in the darkness. I wanted to use parts available at local online shops only. I wanted to keep the setup compact as much as I could. After being unable to find COB or ultra bright LED, I moved forward with a generic 5mm white LED.
If I use Sparkfun’s Super bright white LED, do you think I will get a better sight of the book? Actually, that was my first choice but that one wasn’t available at the online store where I sourced my parts from.
Discrete LED purchases are probably going to be hit or miss as to the spot pattern and intensity as we see in your photo. A lot depends on your mounting technique and how much extra light is tolerable and flexibility on your battery. A reading lamp on a jet liner or even a map light in a car is a bit much for a cozy couple pages in bed. I’ve noticed some hotels lately have reading lights on the headboard with flexible goosenecks, they’re great.
I’d look for an inexpensive donor product that uses suitable LED(s) and hack/adapt it to your book mount. For example, I bought a couple batches of this sort of thing and I think they’d be just about ideal and, like, a dollar. Each of mine has six SMT LEDs, each fairly low intensity, and the milky diffuser makes for a pleasant area lamp. USB battery banks are readily available and would power these for days.
One of that listing’s example photos seems right on.
As above…if you do still want a DIY one I’d be sure to grab a light diffuser of some kind (or repurpose one) that should spread the light cone into a more even distribution
