Originally Posted by bkrownd
Ye gods, what have I done?!?! After a year, I've finally finished my homebrew Luxeon I tail light! It is a Lux-I, MicroPuck regulator, two AA batteries and a 5x20 degree oval-beam lens. The housing is just a clunky plastic shell with RTV to seal the window, so don't ask for pix, I just wanted to finally get it done with parts-on-hand. Anyhow, I noticed that cars are not passing me despite plenty of lane width, which is annoying because they're on my tail slowing traffic to the 7-10MPH crawl I do up this hill. When I got home tonight I decided to take a look before turning on the garage light. I was blinded at 25 feet, and could barely see the bike beyond the light! Ouch! I even had to look away from the light after turning the garage light on. I may have become one of those annoying jerks blinding other traffic with too-bright lights. I'm considering cutting the power to a single AA battery to tone it down. Are there laws about too-bright vehicle lights?
Finally making progress on my quad Lux-I headlight, too. It sucks that I don't have (legal) access to a shop milling machines or lathes anymore.
Nicely engineered, and it seems like drivers see you, and that's what most of us here are trying to accomplish. Do you really think it's too bright? How does it compare to a car brake light? The reason I ask is I'm building a tail light/stop light that uses four red 1 Watt Luxeon Stars. They will be running at 10%, or about 35 ma. for tail light duty, and the full 350 ma. when I hit the brakes. Two will have the 5 x 20° oval optics and the other two will have 25° wide angle optics. If I find that they are way too bright, instead of reducing the drive current I will experiment with the optics to get wider visibility. You might want to pop in a 25° optic if you have one to see how it compares to the oval for brightness.