L.E.D. Bike Lights: Home Made. #cycling #bicycling #hacks #bikelights #bikelight

5MV-100 – L.E.D. Bike Lights: Home Made.
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https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fiveminutevelo
Over the years I have been making my own bike lights. In this video I open a box of some of my past efforts in making my own (front) bike lights. I look in the box and explain the lights that I had constructed, why I made them and some of the advantages and disadvantages. For the record I have also made rear lights, I just don’t show them in this video.

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About the 5MV channel
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My name is Terry and I love cycling. I have named my channel “Five Minute Velo” (5MV). I have called it 5MV because the videos I upload will (mostly) last no longer than five minutes. Each video will cover just one subject that is described in the title. Although the channel is mainly about cycling on the road, I will also cover some light (gravel) off road riding and cycle touring from time to time. No matter what, much of the advice will be pertinent to many branches of the sport/pastime.

I am new to posting videos on YouTube (May 2020) and I have much to learn, particularly in terms of presentation style and production quality. As such I welcome constructive comments that will help me improve the videos that I produce and upload.

There may be some dry humour in some of the videos, so dry it may not always be obvious :-).

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My strava profile can be found here:
https://www.strava.com/athletes/7723982

Cambridge Cycling Club website:
http://www.cambridge-cycling-club.org.uk/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fiveminutevelo/

Photos of 2019 Tour of low countries:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/3ierczDfurM1gTGi7

Random cycling photos (will be updated from time to time):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VZBhCWcQZtynsJF1A

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Terry

current LED lights are pretty good they’re actually quite powerful the batteries last quite a long time and in general they can be quite light in the past this was not always the case in the 1980s when I started cycling we use lights with incandescent bulbs quite common Brands where evered and wonder lights we thought they were called Wonder lights because you wondered whether you were going to crash into something yes the beam was that bad to counter these problems in the early 1990s I started making my own lights again these used incandescent bulbs however I used a more powerful bulb and I tended to use big batteries and when I say big I mean big they were lead acid batteries and they weighed about 1 and A2 kilos it gave good light but it was very heavy very cumbersome and took a long time to charge in the early ughs more powerful LEDs became available and I started to experiment in this box are some of my experiments I put these in the boxo probably uh 10 years ago and I’ve hardly opened it since I have been avoiding riding in the dark throughout the winter the weather’s getting better now and the evenings are lightening up so I’ll be going for some evening rides however it still gets dark relatively early so I will need some lights now I could use these and maybe I will but it got me to thinking about these lights I experimented with all those years ago so I thought I’d have a look I’m going to open this up now and we’ll take a look at these together remember this is about the first time I’ve looked in here for probably at least 10 years so let’s have a look inside and we just have a box full of what looks like a load of junk what I’ll do is I’ll take some of the parts out I’ll go through what I built why I built them and how well they did or didn’t work now this was in several stages so I’ll start off with the early prototypes and tell you about those and then work up to the later prototypes now this is part of one of my early prototypes the LED module is here this is the white bit and I made it out of a waterpipe fitting although I purchased an LED module and lens unit plus a circuit board in here that regulates the current and stops the LED bulb blowing if I put in too much voltage as you can see I’ve got a wire on here with a plug and I plug this into a battery pack I’ll talk about the battery pack in a minute I put this together with these couple of brackets as you can see there are two stations here and I actually run two of these in parallel that’s partly because these led units were not quite powerful enough later on I added this GoPro Mount so that wasn’t part of the original setup but let’s move on and look at the battery pack so how these were powered so this is a going to say a typical battery pack um I did make several sorts here’s a much larger double pack yeah I also made up some like this which take four cells as well and there was a smaller pack that took AAA cells I built this little pack and we could put the battery pack in there in fact I could fit two battery packs in this one and that would hang over the top tube and then be plugged in so that’s how the battery packs worked and I tended to use uh rechargeable cells although I could use non-rechargeable cells as well if I want to and I’ll use those now to see whether this works if I open this up and put these cells in these are just ordinary alkaline cells right so now I haven’t plugged this in for quite a few years so I’m going to plug it in now and see whether it still works and yes it does there’s a bit of light coming out of there if I compare that to the light from a modern bike light you can see it’s completely overwhelmed that’s one reason I used two of these in fact I used two different versions of this one had a slightly higher current driver in it so the uh LED would actually be a bit brighter so I’d have one do one and one brighter one there are also some slight differences in that I changed the position of the LED relative to the lens on one of them that was a more powerful one and that was so I could make more of a spotlight the one here which was a wide angle lens and the other one would be more of a spotlight so the two worked in combination with each other anyway that was the first early prototype although by modern standards this isn’t very bright at the time it actually wasn’t too bad this was the next prototype and yes this is a carbon fiber tube in fact I labeled it as the world’s first carbon fiber LED bicycle light again it’s got the same module in here um and again I made one of these with a wide angle lens and one with more of a spotlight the first prototype didn’t have any switch on it however on this one I have put a switch in there so I can turn it on and off at the light let’s see whether it works yes it does again it’s quite a modest light output again I used it in here two of them in combination in order to have one wide angle and one Spotlight so that was the second prototype after a while I started to get a bit frustrated with these battery packs I really wanted to go to a rechargeable system so my next iteration I made this these are a couple of lithium ion cells in here I think they’re 3.6 volts each and there are two so it’s about 7 volts and again it Powers this sort of similar light and I’ve made it a bit more waterproof by putting this waterproof plug on there making the battery pack waterproof by wrapping it in heat shrink and I made this a little more waterproof too unfortunately I can’t test this out because this battery hasn’t been charged for about 15 years and I don’t even know if it still works maybe I’ll try charging it and see whether it does work the light in here was actually much more powerful than this one about twice the current I think these were 250 milliamps whereas this was 500 milliamps so about twice the power maybe about twice the lumens coming out of it and again I tended to run two of these that gave me a much better light than I was expecting and the runtime on this was around about 5 or 6 hours so it gave quite a good light for quite a good time now the cost of this unit I think had gone up to around about 15b including the batteries I was buying all of these parts from a Chinese website no it wasn’t AliExpress and I can’t remember the name of it now um but they were quite reliable and they delivered what they said they would because my lights here were actually probably better than most of the lights on the market at the time this was in probably about 2003 and indeed I passed many of these lights on to friends and there was one in particular which which I made a high power light a high power spotlight that I gave to somebody called Digby and if you’re out there at the moment Digby do you still have that light um and he used it on the top of his helmet in order to light the path while he was mountain biking at the time commercial LED lights were around about 60 to 100 and I thought about making some commercial lights but I wanted to keep the cost down and this were the next set of prototypes and these were primarily produced in order to see whether I could reduce the cost down to an acceptable level as you can see they have clamps here for the handlebars uh just an ordinary round handlebar they again had an LED light module with a glass front and they were inserted into this piece of waste pipe and I made a blanking Pate at the rear with an onoff switch and obviously a electrical input again I haven’t tried these for many years so I’m going to see whether they still work I was using the same sort of battery pack it works now these were a bit more of a spotlight not that powerful but at the time they were not that bad in fact they were actually fairly good but a modern day light just completely blows it out of the water and that’s one reason why I made these in a pair now I think again I made one of these slightly more powerful potentially these could be manufactured for around about20 however it took me quite a while to produce these and in the meantime commercial lights were getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper and eventually these really just became uncompetitive compared to commercial lights so as a commercial project I abandoned them I did carry on using them for a few years though probably through to around about 2010 which is when I started using other lights more commercial lights um and then these went in that box that you saw earlier so that’s sort of a summary of my LED lighting experiments these days you can just go out and buy one of these about 10 or 15 and extremely powerful extremely bright last well and are very reliable so building your own is not really necessary however I did enjoy making these and I passed a few of them on to some of my cycling companions anyway that was a quick overview of how I experimented with LED lights in the early days of well LED lights I hope you found this interesting and hopefully well it’s probably not useful but uh if you did find it interesting please give it a like maybe a thumbs up and if you want to see more crap like this consider subscribing from me until the next video it’s goodbye