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Step 8Rig it up and get on the road
With everything sealed up and glued in place, solder and shrink wrap on your preferred connector on to the power wires for the Buck Puck. Then glue on a strip of rubber or foam on the bottom curved portion of the bracket to protect the paint on your ride and to improve the grip of the light on the handlebars. The benefit of the o-ring mounting style is that you can quickly remove your light when you park it in theft-able areas. The limitation of the o-ring mounting style is that it isn't very rigid. Thus if the ride is really rough or the o-ring too loose the light can shift around. If you find that to be the case, you can use zip ties to put it on more permanently or modify the bracket to have a screw and clamp. See pic below for my mounting method. The world is your oyster.
Possible future improvements:
1. Add a magnetic reed switch inside the electronics cavity to allow water-tight on-off function. My bike electrical wiring harness has its own built in waterproof switches for the various functions so I left a switch out of this design, you can modify as needed.
2. Use a buck puck with dimming and external control to add a flashing and dimming mode. There is plenty of room in the electronics cavity for a small PCB to switch and dim the light. I figure with 500 lumens, no flashing is needed. Besides, I have a xenon flasher on the back that is plenty adequate.
3. More cooling surface area. I have found that the whole copper body gets pretty hot under continuous 700mA operation when not moving through the air on a ride. I would estimate it gets in the neighborhood of 120F, which is hot but not burning you hot. This means that the LED junction temperature is much hotter, but since Ihave not seen noticeable light output dropoff I don't think the junction temperature is too high. In order to improve this, I would fold some thin copper strips and solder them to the outside of the body before adding the LED and electronics.
Possible future improvements:
1. Add a magnetic reed switch inside the electronics cavity to allow water-tight on-off function. My bike electrical wiring harness has its own built in waterproof switches for the various functions so I left a switch out of this design, you can modify as needed.
2. Use a buck puck with dimming and external control to add a flashing and dimming mode. There is plenty of room in the electronics cavity for a small PCB to switch and dim the light. I figure with 500 lumens, no flashing is needed. Besides, I have a xenon flasher on the back that is plenty adequate.
3. More cooling surface area. I have found that the whole copper body gets pretty hot under continuous 700mA operation when not moving through the air on a ride. I would estimate it gets in the neighborhood of 120F, which is hot but not burning you hot. This means that the LED junction temperature is much hotter, but since Ihave not seen noticeable light output dropoff I don't think the junction temperature is too high. In order to improve this, I would fold some thin copper strips and solder them to the outside of the body before adding the LED and electronics.
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Nov 21, 2008. 9:20 AMajonesin
says:
what are you using as a power source?
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21
Nov 21, 2008. 10:12 AM
jmengel (author)
says:
jmengel (author)
says:
I think I discussed this in detail in a previous comment. Check that out. The short answer is a 12V Li-Fe-Po battery pack.
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