I have a rather unusual situation. I want to make a light system for my new SUV:
It has two front wheels, and the rear half is like a normal bike.
I want two headlights on the front (one on each side of the box), and one tail light in the rear. I want to have a single, centralized power switch that will turn them all on or off — no modes, no flashing, none of that. And a single battery to charge.
Here’s my current idea:
Buy two headlights, something like the MagicShine 808 (with XM-L T6), strip out the driver circuit, and run the wires directly to the LED. This will run right off of a 3.7v lithium battery, correct? At around the 3A max current? Or am I misunderstanding this?
Take these two headlights, wire them in series, and run them on a 7.4 battery back. A latching power switch would control power from the battery, and could mount on the handlebars or nearby. Would it be worth using a relay for the switch, so there’s not a bunch of excess wire in the main power circuit?
I also looked at using a P60 host and that could work fine too. I’m mainly looking for easy mounting on the bike, and good looks (looking like a flashlight could look silly here). The MagicShine is a bit ugly to me, actually, so I might not use it specifically. A flashlight would also require modding to run wires into it. I also need to make sure I can easily fit a wide angle or elliptical lens on it. I don’t want a flood light, as that can blind people on the road. I also, of course, don’t want a narrow spot light.
The tail light, I’m still not sure about. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the headlights, running into dead end ideas. But it would of course need to run on 7.4v. I think the red light on this page could work: http://www.ebikes.ca/lights/ . It has modes, but it also has a memory that keeps it on the same mode each time it’s powered on.
Another idea would be to use a 3.7v battery pack, and run the two headlights in parallel instead of series. But I’d possibly need to use bigger wires, and I think it’s less likely I’d find a tail light that would easily work with this.
I imagine I could have a barrel plug jack wired to the battery, and I could simply plug it into a charger in the garage.
A battery life indicator would be nice, but is low priority, and I fear the added complexity. I’m also not sure it would really be all that helpful. I’m sure I would quickly get a feel for the battery life.
Any advice would be really appreciated. Thanks!