700 Lumen LED Bike Lamp

700_lumen_bike_lamp

We’ve seen bright bike lamps before. This one caught our eye because it needs a heat sink while in operation. [700lumenLED] built a super bright light for his bike that features an aluminum enclosure and heat sinks to protect the LEDs against overheating.  Some nice work was done incorporating the 12v battery into a bike bottle with the power switch and a dimming potentiometer attached to the bottle cap.

15 thoughts on “700 Lumen LED Bike Lamp

  1. @roy:
    power leds get really hot, but out the “back” side. some high-power led designs use some thermal feedback to keep the operating point sane, others just throw a big heat sink on it and let ’em go.

  2. With only R2’s, that’s only marginally better than my 3x Q5 setup – but I would suspect that the use of just lenses with no reflector backing means the cast and fullbrights aren’t as useful with much of the energy wasted – especially given the existing lens on the bulbs. Brute force instead of finesse.

    Though I’m planning on my next build using R2’s, but I’m going with this reflector:
    http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18842

    Probably go with the same pucks I did for my existing unit:
    http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.3256

    Just like my existing unit I’ll do one puck per bulb and put copper VGA ramsinks directly on the base of each bulb. I like the 14mm base DX has for the Q5’s.
    http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11023

    I’ve looked at the R2 on a premium star, but my parkinsons ridden hands aren’t up for cutting things down anymore – and really I don’t consider the 2-3% brightness difference to be worth the 20% price hike.

  3. @dielectric:
    I’m not disagreeing at all with what you’re saying I just wanted to note that with enough output you can actually feel some heat from LEDs out the front as well. I built a custom light a year or so ago that puts out around 800 emitter-lumens and you can feel some heat from that radiating out the front. Nothing even remotely close to an incandescent though (I managed to burn a hole in my TV with a custom incandescent I built which turned itself on when I wasn’t around, whooops)

  4. I’ve wondered why I haven’t seen more bright LED projects on hackaday. Check out candlepowerforums.com for some good info.

    My light setup for my bike is a Marwi P7 conversion that puts out around 700 lumens. I don’t need an external heatsink, the one inside moves all the heat to the body. While stopped it gets hot quick, I have to dim it until I get moving.

  5. If one was to take a microcontroller and create a stobing circuit with this set up, one could find out the frequency of the stop lights around town with a few adjustments. :-) However, I hear it’s not highly suggested.

  6. Intructables has really gone down in my view with all their forcing people to sign up and log in for more and more functions (although I understand the PDF being users only).
    I used to have that site in my quicklinks but no more, you can’t even see the secondary small pictures without logging in.
    It’s a pity, and an affront to people that submitted articles when he were more reasonable, but it shows that you should never put too much money on a single horse eh.

  7. Quite nicely put together, although i’m not sure that using a heatsink is anything new with high power LED’s. I’e been seeing cheep 20w modules floating around on ebay quite a lot recently. Has anyone had any luck with these?

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