My concern is that the CC current is 1A. When the driver is switched on, it may draw more than 1A. I don’t know if this will damage the IC.
Should be fine.
Actually it only gives 850mA not the claimed 1A.
If the draw is more then the charge current then it will draw some from the battery. If the battery can’t provide the extra needed then the led just won’t get it. You can’t ‘pull’ more from the TP4056 then its willing to give. The chip reduces its output if it gets too hot.
As mentioned very creative matthemuppet. Love your work.
nice going 
. And I am really looking forward to the looks of the end result (I am confident it will be beautiful and shiny 
)
(oh, and is it possible to set the white balance of your camera to 'fluoresecent' or another indoor setting so that the pictures get less yellow?)
Noticed these Nichia headlamps today, not sure if they are 219 high CRI LED’s though.
Looks like it is 3x Nichia 5mm leds. Max output is 37 lumen.
Yeah I think you are right, I looked up Nichia 5mm LED’s and it does look like it could be them.
thanks for the info on the charger guys, I never knew that. I just wired it up and it works 
I did get one where the status LEDs had been swapped by accident, which took me ages to figure out as I thought that it wasn’t charging.
djozz - I’ll try out a few settings. I don’t much care for the indoor setting colour rendition, which is why I’ve avoided it before, but I’ll see if there’s something in between. The garage shots will be yellowish simply because the work lamp (there’s a thread on here somewhere) uses a frankly horrible WW XR-E. I’ll be swapping it out for a Nichia 119 asap.
No progress last night as I spent a joyful 4 or 5h replacing one rear suspension spring on my car (wish I had my headlamp). I hate that car, I really do. It’s now booked in the garage tomorrow so they can do the other one and finish off the balls up I did. I may not get to this again until next week as the son of a family friend is coming from France today and we’re going camping tomorrow (where, yet again, I’ll miss my headlamp :(). Still, at least it’s Friday!
Hope your family friend doesn’t get too upset with you when his son comes back a flashaholic.
Thanks for the update and have a great trip!
I'm not sure he's a flashaholic, but he's a complete convert to night riding - we did a 4h night ride with him and he couldn't stop talking about it afterwards :) Still, having 2 or 3000lm combined helmet and bar lights probably helped. I need to find him a few different options so he can get his own now he's back in France.
Anyway, now that Frenchman is back in France, paper is submitted, 2 out of 3 car jobs are done and the main scary one (removing the dash) is coming up this weekend, I've managed to make a start on the housing.
holes for the end plates have been drilled, somewhat where they were supposed to be (I really need a drill press) and the front piece has been roughly cut. Next on the list is to bend and drill those tabs, followed by drilling and tapping holes for the front piece, LED and mount into the main housing.
I'm riding tonight, so fingers crossed I'll get to it on Wednesday evening :)
managed a solid 1 1/2h last night - drilled and tapped the holes for the emitter and front piece, bent the front piece into its final shape and polished the housing where the emitter and front piece will sit.
main body
front piece. It didn't sit quite even, so I had to spend some time filing and sanding one side so it sat flat
what it'll look like when it's screwed together
and what my work bench looks like after I've "tidied it up" :D
on the list for tonight is to cut and fit the lexan for the front piece and cut/drill/JB weld the bracket on the back that will attach the light to the head band. Fingers crossed tomorrow I'll be able to put everything together for my monster car work day on Sunday!
nice! this build is slow but steady going, thanks for the update
thanks! Life has certainly been busy the last few months, so this has taken a lot longer than it should have. The fear of taking the dash out of my car without a headlamp has been an effective motivator though
I would have got more done last night, but I spent an hour sorting through this bucket of tools that I found in a metal recycling bin at work
pretty amazing, donchathink? Some of that should sell on eBay and get enough to pay for some heating oil with some left over for new lights/ tools!
Anyway, onto the build
Magicshine head band drilled for the bolt (from my random bolt collection)
Stepwise shots of making the back bracket
perpendicular grooves cut into the housing and brackets to give the JB weld something to key too
and clamped in place
I checked it this morning before going to work and it all fits perfectly.
Now I just have to fit the lexan cover and stick it all together!
finally got the light finished, although it's taken until now to find the time and energy to post up the rest of the pics!
so, continuing where we left off, here's the housing with the JB welded on brackets
front piece with the cut out lexan square, before it's pressed in and sealed with 5min epoxy
guts inserted, with extra long LED wires coming in handy here. It was a bit of a fiddle getting the wires through the holes, but the stiffness of the teflon wire helped a great deal here. Also 5min epoxied on a piece of inner tube to cover the switch. Screws are from a scrapped microscope filter wheel a friend gave me, still working my way through them.
it'll be a complete sod changing out any of the guts. It'll probably be easier just to solder on new long pieces of wire and repeat the process if I end up doing that in the future.
Nichia 219 on alu sinkpad (free sample, yay!) wired up and screwed down
optic glued in place with non-acetic silicone. I've used 5min epoxy before, but it's too brittle/ rigid and vibrations or knocks can work it loose. Silicon has enough give in it that you can smack the monkeys out of it and it'll stay put. Bit of a pain to clean up if you want to change the optic though.
finished! Front piece has thermal compound under the flats and the top and bottom edges sealed with silicone
other views
and fancy GIF style (credit to 9V jigsaw light maker :))
no beamshots as it's pretty much pure flood. A bit more focused than a bare LED, but not much. Pretty much perfect for close in work and lights up the backyard out to ~40ft or so, which is just fine by me. Not as bright as I expected, but then I think I've been spoiled by all the high power lights I have, plus the floodiness probably makes it look dimmer compared to a more focused light.
So, how'd it work? Perfectly :) Replacing the evaporator core on my car took ~24h total over 2 days and this light stopped what was already an unpleasant job getting less pleasant by allowing me to see into all the nooks and crannies for weird fasteners and hidden gotchas. I ran it on whatever medium is (stock mobydrv settings, haven't had a chance to program it yet) and recharged it everytime I took a break to eat, drink coffee, use the toilet and generally curse my car. It neither got warm nor ran out of battery. No whine from the driver, no battery to get in the way and a relatively comfortable headband (a bit tight perhaps). The car is now back together and AC is working fine, just in time for autumn :)
I even used the light to pick some strawberries after my ride last night - another use for high CRI lights!
Things I'll change? I'd like to move the light closer in to the headband and make a proper surface for it to rotate on. As is, it's not very smooth to adjust up and down and the weight hanging out the front makes it bob a bit with movement. Also, in my peripheral vision it looks like I have a small man's package hanging from my forehead, which was occasionally distracting. I might also play around with different optics too, perhaps swapping in a LXP narrow flood optic to make the most of the lumens. None of that's going to happen for a little while though as I'm completely burnt out with making and fixing things - time to kick back and recover!
Very cool! Congrats! I was thinking to post about how to "glue" optics to an emitter as I may need to do this soon on my Lawnmower LED headlight mod (I've never used optics before). I haven't even test fitted the optics yet so I don't know if they "snap" on or what. I don't want anything too permanent, but it does have to withstand being bumped around. Any ideas? What exactly did you use? Link?
-Garry
That made me LOL! Great work! The evap core on my Subaru was luckily really easy to get to. Sucks when stuff is jammed up under the dash.
LOL on the package comment.
Looks good man. I would take that headlamp over most of the mass produced stuff out there.
I can't believe someone would throw all those great tools away. I wish the tools could talk. It would be interesting to know the story behind that. Probably would be a sad story. Glad you saved them.
none of the optics I use snap into place, in fact some of them are a complete pain in the azz to use as you have to cut way the bottom of the holder to allow room for wires and screws. You do need the holder though as this keeps the base of the optic at the exact height for that particular LED, which can really affect beam focus and quality.
I use non-acetic acid cure silicone which I bought from Home Depot ages ago. I vaguely remember spending ages reading the ingredients on every tube they had until I found one that didn’t have acetic acid in it - what makes the stuff stink when it’s curing and also corrodes electrical contacts.
I usually put a very small (1mm x 0.5mm) bead around where I want the optic/ holder to go, centre the optic and clamp it in place until it’s dried, then add a whole bunch more to properly hold it in place. Let it cure out in the open before you seal the light up or you’ll get condensation on the inside of the lens.
If you only need a little bit I can easily put some in a tube and stick it in an envelope, you don’t need much for a couple of optics. I actually keep mine in a 5 or 10ml syringe from work, but that might be a little harder to post
thought it might
Yup, the Ford Focus is expressly designed to completely piss off any owner that dares trying to work on it themselves. Oh the stories I could tell…
thanks! I’m very pleased with it, it’s pretty much exactly as I wanted. Now I just need to fiddle around with the program settings to find the various sweet spots.
As for the tools, they’re from the main university metal shop’s metal recycling bin (a favourite haunt of mine). My guess is that was the original tooling that came with the various lathes they have (and boy do they have some tooling) and has since been replaced by quick change tool posts that are a lot easier and quicker to change tooling on. So I guess they had a clearout and slung it in the recycling bin. Now that it’s sorted out I need to clean it all up (other than the wrenches, the chuck and the QCTP) and stick it on eBay to generate some funds.
funnily enough, I’ve already used a couple of the wrenches - the large ones came in very useful for swapping out the orifice tube on the new high pressure line for a variable one I bought last year. Nothing goes to waste with me around