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The "Alien Eye" Homebuilt "Darkness was
yesterday" |
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Mtn. bike light vs. road light Alien Eye Basics Making your own Alien Eye Waterproofing
your Alien Battery Options Low Profile Helmet Safety Lights
the Alien Eye "Atom"
Helmet
Light
This 5w 10° Edison Opto LED lamp Alien Eye as Helmet Lamp
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Welcome to my page on homemade lights for mountain biking and off road riding. Please note that the lights mentioned here are not approved for street use and are intended for off-road use only. I've monitored homebuilt bike light designs on the Internet for a while now and the limitation to most homebuilt lamps was the lamp/battery combination. Most homemade lights used inexpensive standard sealed halogen bulbs, which draw a lot of power, of which most is turned into heat. This led to poor run time. It was only a matter of time for the lamps to become much more efficient with LED technology. The Alien Eye is my second generation home built mountain bike lamp design. My first design, the "Tubelight", is based upon the same 5 watt LED found in the Alien Eye, but the housing was made from a piece of German PVC sewer pipe. The "tubelight", although easy to build, was not good looking enough for most people, even though I thought it was a novel idea. So after learning that practicality doesn't count, if people don't like how it looks, I stumbled on the process for making the Alien Eye design while trying to develop a process to cast a base for the lamp in epoxy resin.Not only does the Alien Eye have unbeatable cost/performance ratios, but it looks pretty good too. You can choose from a rainbow of colors, unlike most professional mtn bike lights models that come with Henry Ford's Model T color choices; anything you want as long as it is black. Black is however the easiest color to fabricate, since it is difficult keeping dirt and smudges out of the lighter colors. One side benefit of the Alien Eye design is that you need fewer tools than you do with the Tubelight. You don't need a saw or drill anymore. If you can use a soldering iron and if you played with molding clay as a kid, you can build this lamp. It is that easy. So here is what I believe to be the easiest to build, the most cost efficient for the power (1,100 Lux @1 meter, with 4 hours + of burn time) homebuilt off-road lighting system yet. If you are interested in cost effectiveness and performance, it will be hard to beat this design. If you want to pay more money for a light then go to the bike shop and buy the $400+ units. You can find ones with more power with additional features such as dimming, power meters, temperature sensors, and water-tight housings, proprietary Li Ion batteries, but none will beat the cost of the Alien Eye system for the light it puts out. The Alien Eye will not work with hub dynamos since they only generate a maximum of 6.3V and the Edison LED needs at least 10V. The goal of my project was to create a low cost, powerful home built lamp, with readily available components, that anybody with basic tools could build. This meant that the parts must be able to be purchased on the Internet, Ebay or obtained from your local stores. The Alien Eye can be built in about 1.5 hours.The heart of the system is a 5 watt, 12V MR16 lamp format, LED chip with the output equivalent to a 30-35 watt halogen bulb The light from this lamp is very white and not yellowish like some halogen lamps. It provides great contrast on the trail. Unlike traditional light bulbs the Alien Eye is solid state and has a rated life of 25,000 hours. That means the Alien Eye should not burn out in your life time. This LED lamp draws about 530 milli-amperes of current. This is about 1/5 th the current draw of a 35 watt halogen lamp. This means the lamp can be driven with inexpensive and readily available AA Ni MH (Accu) rechargeable batteries, and still have four hours+ of run time with 2300 mah batteries (2300 mah/ 530ma = 4.3 hours) .Of course as the batteries age, the burn time will drop. The lamp also works on the lower voltage from 8 AA NiMh (9.6 Volts) batteries. A double battery pack could increase the run time to well over eight hours. Since the batteries are standard, the cost to replace or to carry extras is very affordable, unlike the professional designs with $100+ proprietary replacement battery packs. Tthere are also high capacity 12V Li Ion batteries availalbe out of Hong Kong on Ebay, which can be used to powr your Alien Eye.. The battery pack can be placed in a water bottle and carried in the water bottle cage, or in a camera bag under the handle bar stem. The Alien Eye and mount weigh 120 grams. The 10 pack AA battery pack in a water bottle weighs 400 grams. The Alien Eye is attached to the handle bar with a standard Cateye quick release lamp mounting system. The Cateye clamps come in 28 mm and 32 mm sizes and allows side to side rotation of the lamp for about 30º. I've been using the handlebar lamp and the helmet lamp and they are unbeatable when riding in the woods at night. Two Alien Eyes can be easily mounted on the handle bar and can be connected to one battery pack with the appropriate power cord splitter, or can be run them with the double battery pack. This website will show you all you need to know about building your own Alien Eye mountain bike light. Part descriptions and part numbers are listed on the costs page. If you need some parts, a complete kit with all the parts, or do not want to make your own lamp, write me. |
Alien Eye in alien green
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