Saturday, August 13, 2011

Bike light phase 1

Finding the right combination of price, brightness and battery configuration can be difficult for a bicycle light. I started off with one from here:
http://www.buyincoins.com/details/white-led-head-bike-bicycle-light-flashlight-w-mounting-access-02-product-379.html
It came with a pretty useless reflector and LED.
My next step was to replace the LED with a Cree XM-L. It's a bit excessive but oh well.




I had read about the epoxy layer being too thick on the board so I followed some steps to make the thermal interface more direct. My tubes of Arctic Silver thermal epoxy had gummed up so it was a bit of trouble gluing it down!


Running off three rechargeable AAA cells directly, the LED draws around 350mA. I'd say this is about the minimum I'd go with for now, with about 1W output. I'll take the XM-L module to phase two and swap in an older module for this torch... I think I still have an XR-C somewhere that I haven't blown up yet.

No comments:

Post a Comment