Juha,
On my other light I overvolted by 15% with no problems (just going by the packaged ratings). It worked fine and the housing did not melt.

For those just thinking building your own lights. Here are 2 previously posted URLs that are pretty handy...
http://www.myra-simon.com/bike/lights.html#overvolting
http://nordicgroup.us/s78/#Myths%20a...ting%20Systems

John,
Consider going with a 5 AH sla. They are practically the same size and weight as the 4 AH. As MapTester mentions, ZBattery.com is an excellent source. Look at the 1000ma charger. They are inexpensive and work great. I like that they have a red LED for "Charging" and green for "Charged". With the green LED lit there is still a trickle charge that keeps the battery topped off without overcharging.
Regards,
Raymond

Splat,

Cool light setups! What sort of light director did you use on this lens to control the beam?

I do use 20% if you go by the voltage listed on the battery. 12 AAs should be 14.4, but they sure test higher than that after a full charge.

Quemazon,
Check out this website.

http://www.optronicsinc.com/competition.htm

I have tried both the QH-7CC and QH-8CC, 7 is chrome plated metal, 8 is a sturdy plastic. Otherwise similar and both work fine. Just depends on whether you want a chrome look or a black look. I have not found them locally, but Optronics will sell them to you if you give them a call. Either costs only about 15 for a PAIR, and both use MR16 lamps. They come with 50W lamps, but I put in either a 35W Solux or the 20W draw/35W light Phillips energy saver. To me these lamps make it hard to justify trying to design your own housing. They are fairly small, inexpensive and come with a mounting bolt. You just have to make or buy a simple clamp of some sort to attach them to.
Regards,
Raymond

Yesterday, I bought the bracket and made the switch and bracket for the front light similar to MapTester's drawing. But some of that waterproofing liquid "electric tape" dripped on the waterproof boot switch and melted a small hole in it. There goes $5.

Having trouble finding LEDs wtih min LED and MAX reflector + refractive housing (like the a car tail light). The ones on the school bus, seem like are ONLY LEDs with a cover.

The current VISTA has a great reflector. It'd be cool to wire some VISTAs or CatEyes in parrellel but there seems to be no way to make a home-made brackets that'll hold up.The MFG bracket is on it's last leg after just 500 miles.

VR: try giving the vistalight customer service people a call. I did this a few years ago to request a new bracket for one of the two lights that came with a "night stick" system. One bracket broke during installation when I stupidly overtightened it. I called them, fessed up & asked for a new bracket. they sent me a complete new light assembly! No charge. Can't hurt to ask. Don

OK ,

Now Battery Charging. I have been charging my Ni-cad cells for years using a Basic Trickle charger. A couple of years ago I moved up to a "RC Car" Quick Battery charger.

well My Ni-cad (6 Packs ) Cells are 15 + years Old I started with 40 I'm down to 15.

so I have come up with this great Idea of Making a Peak Charger.

What I have done So far:
I had an Old 386 mother board in the basement , I attached a Power supply ,FLoppy drive, Video , HArd drive and a MetraByte DAS-4 A/D Board .
I installed DOS 6.22 on it . Installed the DAS4 software, now it can act as an 8 Channel +/-5 Volt Voltmeter , the demo software hasa stripchart recorded.
next I added a Big power supply , Using a Voltage divider I attached it to a Volatge Channel , Next I put a 2 ohn 20 watt Resistor in series and attached it to the AD and and finshed the circuit with the Battery. now I can Watch the Voltage ( and Amperage) as the Battery charges. The AD card also has some IO ports I plan to hook a relay up to them to turn power on and off.

Right now it is all Manual , next I need to programm the compouter to turn the power on and aoff , monitor the time and Current going into the batter y ( so I can Determine how much charge each cell contains after charing. and when The battery Pack has reached Peak Charge.

Long term I plan to take some of my Older Battery packs that have one or 2 dead chells take them apart and charge Battery cells indivually to Make Pcks of Matched cells.

Thoughts ?

I’m jealous. You’re a genius.

I guess it takes one to know one.

I confess he lost me after the part where he said, "What I have done So far:"

:eek:

Quemazon, I think any light can irritate oncoming drivers if it's pointed too high. If you use a 55W (same as car light intensity,) point it low. You're moving slower than cars anyway, so you should have more than enough light to see obstacles in the dark.

That's a truth. You'd think a 4.5 AH SLA would give you twice the run time of a 2.3 AH. But when you put a heavy drain (20W) on a 2.3 AH battery, your run time was only 40 minutes, while the 4.5 AH will give you about 2 hours.

SLA's don't like a fast drain. By the same token, they don't like a fast charge. So a smaller battery will not tolerate the same charger that a larger battery can use quite safely.

In either case, whether draining a battery, or charging it, too fast, the battery's capacity begins to dwindle. Make sure you get a charger that doesn't charge the battery too quickly for it's capacity. Also be sure not to run your battery so low that the light goes yellow (at least, not too often.)

Fortunately, SLA's are cheap compared to NiCd's and others. If you ruin one, you can get another for the price of pizza (but don't do it--waste pizza money on a battery, that is!)

LittleBigMan

I bought 4 single-wire amber trailer BeeHives (3.99 each) for the turn signals. Might be able to get away with just 2. We'll see.

For your various lights, did you wire them in a series? If so, do they all funnel down to 2 connection (pos and neg) to the battery? Or does each light have it's own connection to the battery?

vrkelley, how are you making your turn signals blink? I bought a 2 contact turn signal relay last night at AutoZone, but when I run the power for the LED turn light through it, the light didn't blick. I don't know if I had it setup wrong or if the LED was not drawing enough power to cause the relay to activate. Anybody have any suggestions on how to make low amp LEDs blink?

BTW, I got the low-cost LEDs in the mail yesterday. They were removed from a highway infomation signs, and have both red and yellow/green LEDs which can be powered seperately (I was thinking running/turning/stop light options). 10 for $12.50 at BG Micro on-line; look for sign language. They appear to be new or fairly new and should be bright enough for the job. I'll report back when I get them installed.

MapTester,
Mine's not hooked up cuz, I couldn't figure out how to waterproof-seal the contact points. It's a basic flasher like the one pictured (except mine has battery, Pos, and Neg)

The bulbs are just the regular trailer bulbs (and no amp rating on the bulb!). I went low-tech, cuz shop owners didn't seem to know how to answer my basic questions and it was time to get going on this.

I used 1½ “ PVC pipe to do essentially the same thing in order to give my headlights flashing capabilities. Reference post #173-179 on this thread.

OhioOH,

RE: Post #173 (page 7), You're a genius! I can probably stuff the flasher inside one hive. If not, your PVC idea will work a-OK!

LittleBigMan,
Next to Ohio's old post, you mentioned that you switched to Auto Zone LED hives because, regular bulbs drew too much power. No AutoZones around here. So what sort of mounting bracket did those come with?

VR, make sure the flasher works with LED lights. Regular flasher units won't because they require a certain load. There area flasher units that will work with LEDs.

Kudos for salvaging old but capable equipment. A slightly more modern variation is to use one of those multimeters that has serial ouput. I have one from radio shack that cost $50. Automating the whole charge, discharge routine would be cool, but a lot work. I used to trickle charge all of my cells, then discharge them one by one with a 1 ohm power resistor, and monitor the voltage on the computer. I would then overlay all of the current vs. time plots, and could easily pick off matching cells. Going through multiple cycles, though was a lot of work!

I finally broke down and purchased a Triton battery charger. I never thought I'd pay $120 for a charger, but it was worth every penny. I'm a rechargeable battery junkie with everything from nicad and NIMH to LION and SLA. It handles them all very well. Now I just pop a cell onto the triton and tell it to cycle 4 or 5 times and it tells me the capacity and average discharge voltage at a given current. I can then match it to other cells or toss it in the recycle bin.

Don't get me wrong, though, working out a custom battery carger/cycler would be really cool and if you have the time and patience to work it out, you would have complete control over the charging process. Good luck, and keep us posted.

Hi all!
been reading these posts I am pumbped about building my own system..
quick question for the field. i didn't find any comments on this in the threds, so here goes:

Has anyone tried to use a LED-cluster headlight instead of the single halogen spot that everyone seems to be using?

This company:

http://www.superbrightle ds.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=MR16

..sells a MR16 size lights with a cluster of 24 LEDs that can output the same as a 20watt halogen but use a fraction of the power...

I'm thinking it might be possible to build a killer system with 2 of these babys one on spot, and 1 on flood and an array of NiMH batteries built into a bottle cage..

thoughts?

See post 381 on this thread. I did try the cluster as well:

(MR16-WHO White LED bulb
MR16 bulb with 6 High Output White LEDs
12 Volt AC or DC operation
60 Degree Beam Pattern, draws 200ma @ 12VDC )

But had problems with getting it to work through my flasher. I didn’t pursue it real hard after field tests showed the beam was too wide.

Rainman is right, you do need to be careful. There is a rating on the flasher. The one I have is 2 amps and works fine with my 1 watt LED headlight, unlike the 20 amp one I tried to use.

Eric, look back a couple of pages. I tried an MR16 replacement with 48 LEDs and was not impressed enough to continue using it. However, the LEDs did not seem to be particularly high intensity so the ones from SuperbrightLEDs might be much better. If anyone has or plans to try the ones from SuperbrightLEDs let me know. I will send this bulb for comparison. In fact if anyone wants it I will send it anyway - free to good home. The light is certainly more than the small Cateye headlights. It doesn't seem any brighter than the Cateye EL300 5-LED light, but it covers more area so I guess it does put out "more" light in total.

EricMorin, I use a LED cluster just as a backup and a "be seen" light.

Ohio, Did you use Ohm's law to figure out which flasher? like R = V/I (Resistance = Volts/Amps)?? I'm going to probably go with the Low Tech turns signals because Auto-Zone doesn't seem to see the LED Hives online.

No I'm not that smart. I just went to the auto store and bought the lowest amp one I could find that would fit into the PVC pipe.

You might check http://superbrightleds.com/led_prods.htm the LED Truck Lights section for a nice LED.

I'm gonna try it.. maybe combine the 10 deg. spot and the flood.. sure, if you want to send me the light for comparison.. private Msg me and we'll hook up.
-e

Just make sure you vote.

Eric,
That would be perfect. If you are going to set up two lights you can give us a report, perhaps a pic of the two beams on a wall side by side. PM or email me your address and I will send the lamp.
Regards,
Raymond

Each device has it's own connection to the battery. That way, if one device fails, the rest still operate.

VR,
I think you mean parallel. My setup for instance has one set of wires coming off the battery, P and N. Then there is a Y off the P and Y off the N with one each P and N going to the taillight and one each to the headlight. If you had two headlights you would have another set of Ys, even if you wanted them switched on and off together. Series would have one continuous loop from battery to light to light back to battery with no Ys. I'm pretty sure the former is the preferred method. That's pretty much how houses are wired.
Regards,
Raymond