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Living on a country road has its advantages. It's peaceful and surrounded by nature. But it also has its drawbacks: frequent power outages. Losing electricity is common enough to be more than a slight inconvenience, especially in the evenings when the entire house is plunged into darkness. While most households can manage without internet service for a few hours, living without light is a different story.

My usual solution is to dust off an old LED lamp and load it with four fresh D-cell batteries, giving me a couple of hours of usable light. However, the batteries drain rapidly, and the lamp gradually grows dimmer until darkness once again takes over. So, after the most recent outage, I decided it was time to put my engineering background to work and develop a better solution. To make it produce more light for longer, I explored several approaches for driving the LEDs more efficiently.