Rear light LED on Givi Top Box

[Kymmy]

Last lot of red LED's I got from eBay china was some 5mm clear flat top red.. Ideal for making rear lights as you can put them on a board, and then use a colored resin to fil in the sides flush to the top of the LED. Looks really professional

[davsato]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Superbright red LED's are perfectly visible in daylight

agree, and easy to wire up, just make up a pair of boards that fit snugly behind the red lens on the box (if its the same as mine) and put a load of LEDs on them. 5 or six per side would be plenty, they are bas***d bright, or go for the total overkill approach.
doesnt really matter, LEDs use hardly any juice. i forget now (been 15yrs since college) if you wire them in series or parallel, but there are bigger brains than mine in the forum that can answer that.

as has been said previously the givi contact plate between the box and rack is very neat and stylish but is a bit pants. i would have a go at making my own, in fact i cant see anything wrong with having a lead trailing out of a grommet in the box plugging into a flush mounted socket on the back of the bike, wired into the brake circuit.

hmmm, youve made me want to do mine now, im going to trawl through the maplins catalogue...........

[Lutin]

Originally Posted by davsato

hmmm, youve made me want to do mine now, im going to trawl through the maplins catalogue...........

I got my LEDs from this crowd in China -

eBay Store - Sure Electronics: LEDs, Tools, Components

Delivery was not too long and the prices are very keen - much better than Maplin.

Like I said earlier with my series / parallel combination circuit I think the total current draw is around 80 mA as compared to the original 2 Amps.

[davsato]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

It's only illegal to have a red flashing light on a pushbike if it's fitted to the push bike, if it's clipped on a person then that's fine though I'm not sure if the pushbike rule got recinded in the last few years.

you can have a flashing light on your bicycle, but not as its only light. so as long as you have a solid red tail light you can also fit a flashing one. (written on the packaging of my nippers new bike lights).

cheers for the heads up LUTIN, i'll give them a look see. so can you wire LEDs in series or parallel, or does it make any difference? i was thinking to wire up a bunch in parallel for each "pod" (my box has two lenses, either side of the lock/handle)and then wire each side together in parallel to join a single twin core lead, would that work?

[Traveller]

Originally Posted by Lutin

Oh, don't you worry - there's veroboard, LEDs, resistors and goodness knows what around here.

I used Veroboard to mount the LEDs that I have now as the original PCB did not lend itself easily to what I wanted to do - put two pairs of three LEDs in series.

The LED replacements for downlighters is an idea though, but they would all be white and some of them can be very high current - which was what I was trying to get away from in the first place. Hmmm, got me thinking again though.

As for the inductance thing, this is going to need thinking about. The problem being the variable frequency from the alternator due, of course, to varying engine speed. So, any coils need to be efficient over quite a frequency range of, say, 25 Hz (1500 rpm) to 142 Hz (8500 rpm). Possible, but would need careful coil design.

I thought you would have "heard" of veroboard. Re the downlighters, decking and other ornamental garden lights come in different colours.

Re the inductance link. How about a switched mode power supply? Twelve volt to 24 volt but take a feed off from before the point the output is smoothed? That would give a stable output through the coils to be rectified via Kymmys bridge rectifier and maybe a voltage regulator? Just interesting.

[Lutin]

Switched mode PSU's tend to run in the hundreds of kHz if not MHz.

Still thinking.........

[Snaphappy]

Whoever comes up with a working solution can you make me one as well

Trying to keep up with you all is too hard for a thickie like me

I'm good wiv 'ammers though

[jarl]

Hiya. Can't believe you managed 3 pages without me getting a wiff of this!

Firstly, the law on flashing lights on bicycles has been rescinded, you can now legally run them. Also, as far as I'm aware, motorcycles have an exception to the "no flashing rear lights" rule, though I'm not 100% sure of this.

Inductance loops: More trouble than it's worth IMO. Unless you have iron:iron (or any ferrous metal) contact then it's going to be extraordinarily inefficient. Not to mention the problems with the changing voltage- LED's are very sensitive to a small change in voltage, so IMO really wouldn't be a bad idea. 555 timers can be used to give a roughly sinusoidal output, though, might be a plan?

LED's: Make sure you have some provision for heatsinking if each LED draws more than about 50ma.

White LED's with a red lens are a big mistake, use red LED's.

[Kymmy]

Originally Posted by jarl

Hiya. Can't believe you managed 3 pages without me getting a wiff of this!

Firstly, the law on flashing lights on bicycles has been rescinded, you can now legally run them. Also, as far as I'm aware, motorcycles have an exception to the "no flashing rear lights" rule, though I'm not 100% sure of this.

Wasn't sure if they had rescinded it on bikes, but it's definately in place concerning ALL motor vehicles

Originally Posted by jarl

Inductance loops: More trouble than it's worth IMO. Unless you have iron:iron (or any ferrous metal) contact then it's going to be extraordinarily inefficient. Not to mention the problems with the changing voltage- LED's are very sensitive to a small change in voltage, so IMO really wouldn't be a bad idea. 555 timers can be used to give a roughly sinusoidal output, though, might be a plan?

Yep, but a flat wide loop shouldn't be too inefficient especially if you were using it to charge an internal circuit with perhaps a 2nd smaller loop for the switching But as I originally said I just love prototyping Obviously though as well as the afore mentioned bridge a simple regulator would help

Originally Posted by jarl

White LED's with a red lens are a big mistake, use red LED's.

Never understood why people get white LED's then put them behind red filters as you're restricting a good 60%+ of the light output

[tendays]

throw this in the mix for magic wireless power?
PLANAR Transformer Core, Power Ferrite Low Loss E32 x2 on eBay (end time 25-Nov-09 03:08:52 GMT)