Monday, June 15, 2009

cheap and easy bike light

I built a cheap and somewhat easy bike light for my new twenty year old KHS bike. The design principles were:
1)Relatively bright
2)Efficient
3)Small
4)Lightweight
5)Low power
6)Makes me a sammich

I came up with this: 350 mA micropuck driving a Cree XR-E R2 bin ( a bit brighter than q5 bin, so 114 or so lm). I decided to use the same plastic lens that I used for my previous headlamp, and bought the R2 pre mounted on a star from DealExtreme (it took AGES to show up, as usual, but their support is ok). I'm still working on what to do with the battery back, but this is what I have so far:

1)use hole saw to drill handlebar radius hole into a PVC angle

2)Drill holes at the front and rear for zip-tying

3)solder together micropuck and star
4)cut slot in side of angle,insert metal washer (I actually used a random piece of metal from one of our Ikea dressers that was left over)
5)Bond star to washer with thermal adhesive: thin layer only, as usual.
6)Figure out some kind of removable battery pack: I ripped a plug out of an old nonfunctional wifi router

7)Mount to handlebars with zip ties, and small piece of rubber. It's the same idea as mounting a bike computer, for example.

8)Here's a shot of the plug


The shoddiness of the plug is purely to dissuade someone from stealing such a fine piece of hardware, and NOT because I am a disaster with a soldering iron.

The light is plenty bright, and no word yet on battery life or heating issues. The heating is a typical problem with these high power LEDs, but I have going for me: low current (350 mA), relatively large piece of metal bonded to the star, small gap around the lens through which air can flow.

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