Anyone ever make a LED Headlight

[Andrew1990]

I have been looking for a headlight for my vintage moped with strict power requirements and have come up almost dry.

I then thought about LEDs. They use very little power compared to conventional halogen bulbs and give off more light.


Has anyone made their own LED Headlight and if so, are they better in your opinion?

 

[MotF Bane]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp

Close to the end there's a section on LED lights. Might have a little more information for you.

 

[rstrohkirch]

Yes and it depends

The two largest negatives are cost and heat output. If you were to make your own housing/build your own setup, you're more than likely going to spend $75-100 to get the same output as a 55-60w bulb with a decent reflector on it. If you want to keep your current housing and can't fit a heatsink for the LED then it probably won't work.

Better options would be to re-wind your stator for better output or a mr-11/mr-16 HID light. The trail tech mr-11 is 13w rated for 500lum and the mr-16 is 30w rated for 1850lum. If you're trying to pull 500-600lum(compares to a 30-35 halogen), you're looking at $35-40+ for the led and board, $10-15 for the puck, $5-10 dollars for the heatsink material and reflector, and whatever it takes you to mount it to your moped.

 

[brblx]

how is heat output a negative of LED's? they produce next to zero heat, don't they?

 

[Viper GTS]

Originally posted by: brblx
how is heat output a negative of LED's? they produce next to zero heat, don't they?

No, they produce a ton of heat. The high output models need major heatsinks.

Viper GTS

 

[Knavish]

Originally posted by: Viper GTS

Originally posted by: brblx
how is heat output a negative of LED's? they produce next to zero heat, don't they?

No, they produce a ton of heat. The high output models need major heatsinks.

Viper GTS

Clarification: LEDs produce WAY less heat than incandescent / halogen, but they still produce heat. Big bright ones (like you'd use for a headlight) do need heat sinks.

I don't know if I read it or heard it at a talk by Cree (LED company) I attended in school a few yrs ago, but they said that a HID headlight has about the same efficiency as an equivalent brightness white LED.

The problem is that true white LEDs do not exist. They are typically super bright blue or violet LEDs that are coated with a phosphor that fills in the needed red and green colors to make the blue+green+red into a white looking light. This is why many white LEDs have a blueish cast to their color.

---edit---
I just reread the OP & noticed this is for a MOPED. I'd wonder if you could just string up a few white LED bicycle or hiking head lamps in some kind of package for this application. I guess you don't need a seriously bright light like a car...

Something like this might work:
http://www.ledsupply.com/creemce.php
But they are pretty darn expensive ($35 + heatsink / reflector package) if you need more than one!

 

[exdeath]

Regular bulbs simply heat up a wire and create infrared light (heat from current + resistance). It just happens that if you heat it up enough, indirectly, a small portion of that is visible light as a mere byproduct.

HID lights work like the mercury vapor arc lamps in a LCD or DLP video projector; a continuous electric arc gives off the light. There is no filament. Arc lamps are used when you need a very bright and pure light source that no known filament material can possibly be heated enough to produce without being destroyed. In fact the electrodes in arc vapor lamps shrink over time and give the bulbs a very short life span, measured in hundreds or thousands of hours.

LEDs convert electrical current directly to visible light in the desired spectrum with little to no byproducts.

The heat from an LED is from the continuous high current flow required for higher light output, in a very small area.