Homemade *bright* LED light setup

[Jeremy]

I wish I'd thought of this!

At only £3.99 each I'm tempted to buy 4 of them and wire them all in series for an array-type front light that will work from my 48V battery. The fact that they are 12V units makes it easy to use as many in series as you need to match your battery voltage.

The only snag I would have is getting enough space to mount four lights, as they'd have to fit on the short bar above my "bottom" bracket (which is actually right out the front).

Thanks for the link, I may well get some to play with.

Jeremy

[Haku]

Grandad, I know I should have used resistors for the front LEDs - that's why 3 of them started flickering and died - but I've gotten away with not having to use resistors since I dropped the output voltage of the regulator to 3v exactly, since then I've not had any more do the 'death blink'.
However I do miss the extra brightness that 3.15v gave so I'm thinking of re-doing the front light with 30x 3mm LEDs as I should be able to squeeze that many (perhaps more) into the reflector and the beam spread is more pleasant, in that it has a more even decay from the center rather than the round spotlight of the 5mm LEDs.

Now it's getting darker quicker and the weather is turning for the worse I'll finish off my current setup, and do the photo & diagram thing so others can see what I've done. After that I'll look at re-doing the front light as the back one is certainly bright enough with 4x LEDs mounted behind the reflector, most vehicles give me plenty of room when overtaking

[john]

I bought a couple more MR16 LEDs from here eBay UK Shop - IT Global Solutions: Lighting, Bathroom, Kitchen
These have 24 LEDs each and are rated at 1.5W. I found that at 15V they take 100mA so I used a LM317T to drive the two in series. This gives me 3W of light and they are also more directional than the others so they light up the lane nicely and also throw out enough to the side to light up the kerb/hedge etc.

I also notice that some rain got into the last bulbs. I think this is because the front glass is not sealed to the body, so I ran some super glue around these to seal them.

I had to make a new bracket for the two bulbs, like the last but with one on top of the other and a little higher so that I don't get as much shadow from the wheel.

[Grandad]

Haku, John et al.

I have borrowed a few of your ideas and am now modifying the lights on my bike.



What do you think of it so far?

(I left myself wide open for rude comments there!)

You can see how it is progressing here.

[Grandad]

I am just wondering if I am wasting my time. It might have been easier and cheaper to modify an existing led lamp.


I have just found this lamp at £4.26 plus postage and others here.
They run on internal batteries but could probably be modified.

I don't know what the quality is like however. Anyone else used them?

[Grandad]

I have now fitted a socket to the lamp and mounted the modified light onto the bike.

As the lamp is rated at 12 Volt, 1.3 to 1.5 Watt I connected it to the 24V battery through 3 off 374 ohms in parallel to give a current of 104 mA and 15V across the battery so using 1.56 Watts. A little over the top but no problem on an overnight soak test.

Photo top left:
Lamp now connected through the rear using the original connectors.

Photo top right:
Early dusk. Shows both the LED Cateye Opticube lamp on the bars tilted down for normal use and the modified lamp below used as an 'always on' running light.

Photo bottom left:
The beam pattern shown onto the garage door with the Cateye tilted up. The Cateye gives a sharp pattern where as the pattern from the modified lamp has a more diffused edge.

Photo bottom right:
Shows the two lamps shown from the front with with the Cateye tilted up for comparison. I must admit that the light from the modified lamp is better than expected so I am well pleased with the project.

[giguana]

I have some spare voltage converters if anyone wants, with 36/48 volts input and 5v/80w output. they can be connected in series to make 10/15V output, which is very good for LEDs because most power LEDs are rated at about 3.3V so three in series makes 10v... about 5 cm by 5 cm by 1 cm, 50 g

also it means you can attach regular bike lights to them because 5v is the same as 4x aa/aaa batteries.

I am thinking of using one 12v/10w halogen headlamp and 2 really cheap flashing back lights from eBay wired in series to make 5v...

I have tried the converters at 24V and the output is 5.03v, but I don't have the data sheet, they are rated at 48v in, similar ones can do in between 18 and 70 V but I'm just saying in between 36 and 48 because I don't know. £3 each including postage, as many as you want

[Grandad]

I have now modified the rear light.

If anyone wants a peek see here.
Has anyone else made any changes?

[Haku]

Grandad, blinded any drivers yet? hope so

For a long while now I've been trying to work out how to add more lights to my bike, ones that aren't for my extra visability along dark roads/paths but ones for other road users to see, but they have to be stealthily added so like my reflector lights it doesn't appear like they're there when not powered up.

And today I came up with the perfect solution: LEDs in the plastic caps covering the bolts holding the wheel axles. White for the front and red for the rear, with the tops filed down to give a really wide angle, then I'll have full 360 degree visability with my lights

[Haku]

Had to have a little play, managed to dig up a white and red LED, file off the heads so they're as short as can be which changes their viewing angle from around 15 or 25 degrees right up to almost 180 degrees, stuck some wire & resistors on them and then blu-tacked them to the ends of one side of the wheel axles:

PegLeds! (I wonder if I can trademark that?)




Looks much better than the camera can show, the front LED is a 3mm one and appears to be bright enough to give out additional side-viewing light for when going slow along unlit paths.

I'm just about to order a new front reflector & a big bag of LEDs because I'm going to double the brightness of my front light by mounting as many 3mm LEDs as possible in the new reflector - take that, you cars!


edit: I've just temporarily wired up two 3mm white LEDs with the ends cut off to remove their spotlight effect, one each side of the front wheel axle end and went out for a spin, they work better than expected as the road immediately round the front wheel is lit up very nicely, which also gives me another idea for my final lighting setup I'll be creating soon (the front reflector will have 45 3mm LEDs embedded in it )