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Front Lights tested

A project log for Electric mountainboard with CAN bus + Android app

Mountainboard with BLDC motors, open source drivers, CAN bus communication, custom Android application and cool lights.

lukeLuke 07/16/2017 at 06:000 Comments

A few days ago the weather finally allowed me to test the board outside after dusk.

The test had 2 objectives:

1) test how the module performs, wheather it can be used to ride the board in complete darkness

2) see if designed mounting method is correct (e.g. no screws getting loose)

I covered around 10km (~6 miles) in the neigbourhood and first thing that I noticed is that now the board looks dope AF (I mean, it looked fine without the lights, but now it's even better ;) ).

Second observation is a bit less positive - angle of the beam produced is too wide, so the light quickly fades with the distance. Depending on ambient lighting (street lamps etc.) the visibility range provided by the module is only around 2 meters, which is definitely too short.

Two methods of solving this problem come to mind: using LEDs with narrower angle (currently used have 120deg... - my mistake) or building some kind of reflector to form the beam.

As far as mechanical properties go, I was pleased to see that the mount did just fine - nothing got loose and it was sturdy (so the light does not 'vibrate' when riding on pavement).

I created a short video showing the lights working in blinking mode:

The plan for now is just to enjoy the board and the summer. The Front Lights module has some flaws that can be fixed in version 2.0 (narrow angle LEDs, proper voltage regulation, better buck coverter design), so if I have some spare time on my hands in the future, I will work on FL a bit more.

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