Feeler: custom machined LED lights/housings

[Bryguy17]

Hey everyone,
As many of you know, I've been hard at work designing some trick little LED light housings. I'm just about ready to get them made, and would like to know how much interest people would have in possibly purchasing either an empty housing for a DIY project, or a completed light head. I am hopefully going to have a production run of 15 made, and I will be keeping 6 or 7 for myself, so there will be extras. I Just need to look into demand before I drop a decent fork's worth on machining costs.

Specs for my personal lights:
emitters: cree R2 on 17mm stars
driver: taskLED bFlex UIB2
optics: carclo 20mm - cree spec
connectors: trailtech waterproof from batteryspace
switch: IP67 pushbutton.

Feature:
Approx. light output: 500ish lumens (roughly a trinewt)
approx weight: hoping to get right around 100g per head. batteries will run about 200-300g for lithiums depending on chemistry and capacity.
power: 11.1v nominal battery (3 cell lithium)
runtime: 11.1v 2100mAh: approx 2.5 hr at full power
11.1v 4300mAh: approx 5 hr at full power (my setup will use these)

Beam pattern will be adjustable by switching optics. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two if you already have an allen wrench out.

pictures (design is mostly the same, but has a few tweaks for the better):






So drop me a PM if you'd be interested. Tell me what you are looking for out of it and I can give you a rough price.

[BFloFoxRider.]

PM sent

[Bryguy17]

gratuitous bump for those that weren't up late last night or early this morning

[Burner]

PM sent

[Rockinthecasbah]

what type of mount are you going to use?

[BrewMaster]

How much for just the housing? And like Ricky asked, how will it mount?

[BFloFoxRider.]

the price will depend on how much he gets them made for. LOL. and the cost of materials

[Chewyeti]

tell me about the packaging of the battery unit.

Originally Posted by BFloFoxRider.

the price will depend on how much he gets them made for. LOL. and the cost of materials

captain obvious

[BFloFoxRider.]

Originally Posted by Chewyeti

tell me about the packaging of the battery unit.




captain obvious

He asked for the price of just the housing.

[BrewMaster]

Originally Posted by BFloFoxRider.

the price will depend on how much he gets them made for. LOL. and the cost of materials

cost of materials is minimal. the big cost will be getting them machined. if he is asking for interest, he must have some idea as to how much they will cost.

[Au575]

My interest is inversely proportional to price. Oh, and I'm curious how the head and battery are to be mounted...

[Bryguy17]

Just so that I don't have to reply to every PM that's sent to me, I'm so far looking at roughly $50 for a bare housing, $150 for something built up. This may change if I find a better quote for machining, add some anodizing, or possibly some personalized engraving .

Mounting, you have a few options. There's an M5 bolt hole on the bottom that can be used to mount it to several aftermarket QRs for the bars, or even a cheapy reflector bracket that fits on the bars. For the helmet, I'm personally planning on just using some velcro dual lock. Should be more than enough to hold on a 120g light.

As for batteries, any 11.1v nominal pack will work. That's 3 cell lithium, for example. These are available as ready made packs. Batteryspace.com will probably be the preferred place to get those, since you can get a charger and pack for a good price, and They will already have the connectors that I plan on using attached. For my personal setup, each of the 2 heads will be running on 11.1v 4300mAh lithium packs that I built from an old laptop battery. Charging will be done through a separate charging lead to a computer charger. Most people don't need this though, and the chargers that come with batteryspace stuff should be fine.

[Chewyeti]

ok, so its not a plug and play solution. Battery packs are to be sourced by the end user.

thats what i wanted to know.

[Bryguy17]

Originally Posted by Chewyeti

ok, so its not a plug and play solution. Battery packs are to be sourced by the end user.

thats what i wanted to know.

Pretty much. This allows whoever ends up with the light to choose the battery they want for their application. There's 2150mAh packs for 2.5ish horus of burn time, 4300mAh for 5ish hours, 2150mAh Lipos for lightweight 2.5 hour (176 grams for the ones I'm using ). Also, should you want to mount more than one light to the bars or your head, you can opt for the 6 Ah pack for 3 hours of 1000 lumen goodness

[92se-r]

Not trying to rip on you, but where are you getting these run times from? I assume you are running these around 1A to get the 500ish lumens. They CLAIM 275 lumens for each R2 at 1A. I still have not seen an official datasheet from Cree that verifies this. The only claims I have seen are from Cutter, who seems to be the only store that has bare R2 led's in stock.

In terms of runtime, at 1A, 2150mAH packs will run a little bit over 2 hours at full LUMEN output. 4300mAH packs will not last 5 hours at full output. There will be significant dimming on the light and then the battery protection PCB will probably just shut off the output, to prevent damage to the LiIon battery. Be careful with making your own batteries. Unless you have some onboard protection circuitry or fusing, if you have a short, your battery will catch on fire, severely injuring you and burning your helmet or camelbak. Just be careful with Lithium batteries. Lithiums are no joke. There are new lithium chemistries that are much more benign, but they are not affordable right now.

For battery pack choice, 9.6V NIMH batteries will also work because you only need 1.1V of headroom with the bFlex driver. A cheap option is to buy 2 4 AA battery holders, and get 8 NIMH batteries. You can easily find 8 AA NIMH batteries with a charger for 20-30 bucks.

Regarding the housing, AWESOME. Looks great. You even have the fins going up and down. Someone paid attention in class.