Lightweight camping lighting system - help please

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

Hey Guys,

I have been thinking about creating a light weight, compact lighting system for when I am in the bush/hunting/staying in huts and I wanted some advice.

I have a 18650 USB power supply that can deliver up to 2 amps at 5.5v.

I was thinking about having a couple of xml leds on stars inside a couple of frosted film canisters with some light gauge wiring hooked up to a USB plug to the power feeds etc.

My questions are:

1) If I hook the cree stars up, postive to negative on one site and negative to postive on the other, will they cope with 5.5v, i.e. is that in series so should cope with 6v+ etc

2) What would control the amp’s? Would two leds being hooked up in series at a lower than normal voltage result in a lower than normal current draw?

My ideal would be a couple of XM-l’s LED’s hooked up that I would be driven at around 1.5 amps with a warm colour tint.

Any suggestions, thoughts or comments would be appreciated. Also if you know another way that would achieve my goal but invovle no more technical expertise than I have clearly demonstrated above that I have. keep it simple s……… etc etc

Cheers

II’z

2

Here’s one of my camping/ emergency/ car work lights.

I have a modded Coleman 4D lantern (Coleman 4D camping lantern mod), but I imagine that would be too big for back packing.

Which ever way you go, the simplest option would be pretty much what I did for that emergency light - 1 LED, a 3.7V battery, an AMC7135 based driver and a USB>li-ion charger board. You can then charge the light from either your car (using a 12V>USB adapter) or from your 18650 USB power supply.

Having used this light a bunch, both for camping and working on the car, I would go for a 1A driver (either a Nanjg105C or Kaidomain V2) with low/med/high. I very rarely use High as it’s very very bright in a tent or next to a car. Med is very useful and Low is handy if you want a reading light after every one else has gone to sleep (or want to make the battery last for days). If I were to use it in a cabin, I’d rather go for more lights than upping the drive current. On the plus side, on Med it should last for >12h :slight_smile:

I’d also go for a neutral white or warm white LED. The cool white in this one is quite harsh indoors and I’m about to swap it out for a neutral white. I’d also use non-acetic acid silicone to secure the battery and charger board as the hot glue I used didn’t stand up to the repeated drops I subjected it to :slight_smile:

3

Matt, good thoughts on LED tints. We use two off the grid cabins and I have both of them wired for 12V (what I was interested in reading in Deadeyez’s post) and we are futzing around with E27 screw ins - no pun intended, the future it bright! Lots of new and good choices just in the past year. And into Solar generation for those locations as well. I liked your lantern update, been thinking about a mod, but also hoping to see one already done (properly) commercially.

I am a P60 host w lantern head and/or diffuser believer when we go camping, but am hoping that Deadeyez’s post will generate some interesting new possibilities for our group.

4

thanks :slight_smile: If your cabins are wired for 12V, then strip lighting would also be a good option. Elara strips are high quality and available in a range of tints, but you can also get cheapies off eBay if you need to got more budget, although some of them aren’t that great (ask Texaspyro, he’s done a ton of home LED lighting).

For me, having a nice diffuse light with a warmish tint is the main thing, output comes fairly distant 3rd after runtime. I’ll actually be swapping out the XP-G CW for a Nichia 219 when I get the chance, which should make it a far nicer light :slight_smile:

5

Think we have hijacked this thread a bit…

One cabin we did 25 years ago; fully/properly wired, switches, outlets, ceiling fixtures, clamp lights - incandescent to CFL now fully LED (most of what we have is pretty feeble, but it allowed us to replace a large generator and bank of batteries w a portable generator and now one deep cell marine battery and we are experimenting w solar to keep it charged up. We have 12v blender, coffemaker, radio, propane frig, etc. LEDs were a godsend, even w less than useful outputs.

Never considered strip lighting, but the second cabin just has wires stretched on nails, clamp fixtures, etc., we hump in a battery when we visit…same deal, changing over from E27 base CFLs and early LEDs… something to consider before we go further.

I am getting very particular (like you) about tints indoors, now that I have experienced proper setups, its annoying when you walk into one of the cabin rooms and its like a morgue lighting set up (bare, cold and scary, too sharp).

Camping, another story. Like to keep playing there.

6

oh yeah, sorry Deadeyez :slight_smile:

For room lighting, those strips are the easiest and sometimes best option. Stick’em behind a CFL diffuser and they’ll give you a much more uniform light than most LED replacement bulbs, especially the 12V ones which tend to be spots.

For camping, especially if you’re going to be away from electricity for a while, my preference would be a light + battery + USB charging/ supply board and a small solar panel that can output to USB. You can get USB>1S li-ion charger boards that will also charge USB devices (similar to what’s in those 18650 USB power supply boxes). That way, you can use it to store charge during the day, then charge your GPS/ phone and/ or as a light in the evening.

I only do car camping at the moment, at least until my kids get older, so there’s always a supply of electricity to charge up my lights.

7

I think building from scratch is a good way to get exactly what you want, but you might consider buying USB powered LED lights, and modifying those.

http://dx.com/s/usb%2Bled%2Blight.html?page=2
http://dx.com/p/usb-powered-1w-6000k-100-lumen-bright-white-led-clip-style-reading-light-81045

to answer your questions - you’ll want to use a current controlled driver. when you figure out cost, you can probably assume you’ll want to swap the LED and driver in just about any of those LED lights…but some of them look like good hosts.

8

Finally! A use for a headlight that doesn’t PISS OFF everyone around you! :nerd_face:

9

When we go camping, we don’t have the ability to power a USB port. I have to look at the problem in reverse, how to make light long enough to keep SWMBO happy, without making Dimbo shag bags of batteries or hump gas for the generator?

First off, it may not be a coincidence that, from a high-order perspective, an XM-L LED pretty-well matches the performance of a single 18650 battery. It’s not “that” easy, but it’s a good way of looking at the problem. IOW, you can just wire them together one-to-one and as long as you can sink the large buckets of HEAT away, you’ll be fine except for the “floaters” in your vision caused by the intense bright light. More-than-likely the thin-gauge wires will provide enough R to help a little with the heat.

Putting two in series just to equivocate a pair of 18650s just smacks of redundancy. One LED-One Battery is much easier overall. And the resulting rig would be a lot easier to hang in your cabin (or our tent).

As to the “optics”, when I tried the frosted film canisters, with leftover XR-E’s not expensive new XM-Ls, the results were — if I don’t pun it nobody will — spectacularly brilliant! You will definitely want a dimming circuit!!!

But of course, dimmer means less current, which means less heat, which means less heatsink mass; and now you’re in “the dance”… The film canisters I used have “dark” (black & gray) counterparts. I find it helpful to use the “dark” cap on a frosted canister, if only to have some zone where I can escape that baleful roaring glare!!

The canister seems to have more effect on the output light color than the LED, so don’t waste your money on specific bins.

After all, it turns out, an Ultrafire 501b head fits perfectly inside the Fujifilm frosted canisters, so you could have this solved — dim modes, LED, the works for under $10 each, not counting batteries & chargers. And, you can pop off the canister & have a “normal” ridiculously-bright light!

That’s about where I gave up.

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