Auf Deutsch"Tubelight" Homebuilt
High Power LED
Mountain Bike Lighting System
"Turning Night into Day"
Costs and materials
Cutting the housing
Cutting the switch hole
End Cap assembly
Final Assembly
Power
Supply Options
Camera Bag Battery Pack
Water Bottle Battery
Pack
Saddle Bag Battery Pack
Double Battery Pack
Battery Charger: Suggestion
Cable with 9V clip
Helmet Light
Adjustable Helmet Light
This 5w 10° LED lamp is the heart of the Tubelight system.
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's.
I found what I believe to be the easiest to build, cost efficient, powerful (1,100 Lux @1 meter!) 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 fancy looks and a professional setup then go to the bike shop and buy the $400+ units. You can probably find ones with similar performance and slicker designs 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 tubelight system for the light it puts out.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 hardware store. With these requirements in mind I developed the "tubelight". The light can be built in about 1 hour of time, if you have the proper tools at hand.
The heart of the system is a 5 watt, 12V MR16 lamp format, single LED chip with the output equivalent to a 30-35 watt halogen bulb The light from this lamp is pure white and not yellowish like some halogen lamps. This LED lamp draws 600 milli-amperes. 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 three hours+ of run time with 2300 mah batteries (2300 mah/ 600 ma = 3.8 hours) . A double battery pack could increase the run time to well over seven 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.
The lamp also works on the lower voltage from 8 AA NiMh (9.6 Volts) batteries as well. The battery pack can be placed in a water bottle and carried in the water bottle cage. The tubelight and mount weigh 170 grams. The 10 pack AA battery pack in a water bottle weighs 400 grams.
The housing is made for a standard 50 mm HT German plastic sewer pipe and the the MR16 lamp format fits perfectly with the inside diameter of the pipe. The lamp has its own heat sink and as long as there is some wind from riding, the lamp stays cool enough. I would not leave the lamp on for long periods of time without any cooling wind from riding. If the lamp is used in the summer heat, I would recommend some holes in the housing for cooling of the LED.
The Tubelight is attached to the handle bar with a standard Cateye quick release mount using a custom made adapter plate to adapt the Cateye mount to the 52 mm housing diameter. The Cateye clamps come in 28 mm and 32 mm sizes.
I've been using the handlebar lamp and the helmet lamp and they are unbeatable when riding in the woods at night. Two Tubelights can be easily mounted on the handle bar and can be connected to one battery pack with the appropriate home made 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 Tubelights. Drawings, part descriptions and part numbers will be listed for all designs. I will be offering most components for sale to save you postage and time going to the various shops and buying the individual components, and it will help me recover some of my development costs in the project.
Tubelight with camera bag battery pack
Dual Tubelights
Tubelight with water bottle battery pack
Tubelight Helmet
Lamp
Tubelight adjustable Helmet
Lamp
Red LED Tail Lamp
