Hey, 100% noob here.
I am looking to hook up 5 or more LED’s to my motorcycle for one of the headlights as a sort of cluster. It’ll be more aesthetic than practicality, since I’ll be modding my highbeam light. Rather than 0 function, since these flashlights are pretty bright, I figure 5+ of them would give me decent output too.
I have one of these: Amazon.com
and it cost me 8$. It’s pretty bright to me, since I’m not a flashlight person, and I know there are brighter ones out there. But I’m trying to keep my proj cheap cheap cheap.
So question: how come it seems buying a ‘drop-in’ module is the same price or more than an assembled flashlight? I know a lot of them are ‘better quality/brighter’ etc, but it seems cheaper to buy 5 flashlights than the individual components.
You came to the right place. What you are doing is more closely related to bike lights than flashlights. Drop ins go into flashlights where the springs allow the battery to be removed for charging. Bike lights often use a separate power pack and need wires to complete the connections via a switch to the driver and led. Suggest you look at bike light mods and compare your idea with them. You will need to learn about mounting the reflectors and heat sinks as well as how to drive 5 lights from your voltage.
Thanks for the reply. I think bike lights are too big? I am looking more for the ‘bug-eye’ look, with like 5 small LED ‘eyes.’
Where are the leads on a drop in? Can I not trim off what I don’t need and solder wires/resistors/etc to pos/neg and just use that? I’m confused.
The drop in I linked in OP, someone reviewed it as not very hot. Are heat sinks integrated into flashlights? or are they just not intended to run for that long?
I was referring to how they are wired. There’s no reason you can’t use drop ins or flashlights with the batteries removed you just have to supply the correct voltage via wires to the positive and negative contacts(usually the center pad and ground ring respectively). Unless all of the lights are single mode you may have difficulty keeping them synchronized. A common method around this is the master/slave mod where the IC on one driver controls the output of the others. This thread has several other links you might find useful.
Thanks. I browsed the links, and I’ll continue to do some reading.
I’m still not clear on the drop-ins though, as I’ve never handled one. Do they get hot/have a heatsink? I took my flashlight and I left it on for 1hr, and it was still cold to the touch. Is that because it’s just a low power LED (CREE Q5 LED, I think)? Does higher LM mean more heat? Would a 600LM (something like double what I have?) flashlight grow hotter?
LM stands for lumens and is a measure of light output. Not focus or throw but just the total light output. 1/2 or more of the energy used generates heat instead of light so a 600 lumen light or drop in will generate at least twice as much heat as a 300 lumen light and almost certainly more than that as LEDs become less efficient at higher currents. How hot a drop in gets is a function of the current fed into it. Even a 300 lumen drop in will get hot so if the light it is in is not even getting warm then you have poor thermal contact between the drop in and the host. Take out the drop in after a few minutes on high and feel it. Some use copper or aluminum foil to fill the space between the drop in and the host. If there’s room others have used deanodized pieces if soda cans instead. Drop ins are mostly made of aluminum or sometimes copper and work best when they fit snugly into the host and can use the host mass as additional heat sink. Another way lights are done is with a separate reflector and heat sink that assemble into the light as individual pieces.