2014.10.22 LED light
As with many people, i've been trying to figure out what to do with my tilde club space. I have no interest in making a retro website, what excites me more is the chance to bootstrap something new in a limited space.
Constraints drive creativity (at least for me), so i want to apply some modern website thinking to a simpler environment. This is why i chose to build a site with CSS and images yet doing so directly through a terminal, and now backing it up to github. I'm working on a super simple blog posting script, which has diverted some time from writing, tbh.
That's fine philosophically, but what to put here? Building on my earlier tile floor post, I decided to go with a general project blog; website or otherwise. Some will be a rehash of things from my old blog, but i'll add new stuff as i document it.
I built this LED bike light in 2008.
This is an older project, but that same light is on my regular commute bike now, 6 years later, and it still works great. More details are on the original blog post, but the construction is quite simple. Power comes from a standard generator hub (i have a Shimano); the only electrical 2 parts required for the light are the LED itself and a full-wave rectifier, which converts the hub AC to DC required by the light.
The hub puts out 6 volts and 3W, which matches the LED needs nicely. I get a steady light as low as 4 mph and it's been on as fast as 45 mph without burning out or even overheating, despite a lack of any real heatsink. The case is just a copper plumbing part, and it barely even gets warm while the light is in use. I call the 2-clamp mount 'temporary' in the original post, but i never found anything simpler or better, so it's still mounted the same way.