Monday, November 26, 2007
Great F***ing Lights
LED Holiday Lights + Micro A/C Power Supply = XMas Bike Lights
This photo doesn't do it justice. It's not easy to capture Xmas lights with flash photography. Trust me, this bike catches people's attention as we ride around the neighborhood at night. We routinely have people call out "great bike" from their driveway or front proch. People roll down their windows as they watch us walk it across busy streets and call out "I love your lights". But one guy near the seedier part of downtown pretty well summed it up as he just said "great f***ing lights" as we rolled past him. This is one of my most successful projects.
I bought this tandem bike, a 30 year old Schwinn, off craigslist for $80 just a couple of months ago. My girlfriend and I love riding it around the city. But I've been waiting for the holiday displays to go up this weekend so we can cruise around at night and check out the Xmas lights. That's when it hit me to put the lights on the bike. Sort of like the scene in the A Charlie Brown Christmas TV special when the kids transferred the light display from Snoopy's doghouse to Charlie Brown's sad little Christmas tree. We turned a rusty, squeaky old bike into the most awesome bike ever.
The first step was to find some LED lights. I went to Target because I remembered seeing some small LED light sets there before. These were battery powered which is good but just big enough for a mantle or a table top size Xmas tree. That's really not want I wanted, too small, but I was desperate to make this dream come true.
I was shocked when I ran into full sets of Xmas lights at Target using LEDs. The price is $12 for a standard size set of 60 lights. That may be a high price to anyone else but to me it was the best bargain in the store. Everything I needed to know was printed on the box: draws one tenth the power of standard lights, 5 Watts instead of 50 Watts. Plus the LED bulbs last 20 times longer. I bought two sets for a total of 120 multi-color bulbs even though I had no idea how I would power the lights on the bike.
My first attempt to power the lights at home was pretty pathetic. I experimented with a couple of the extra bulbs provided with each set. The good news is that I got each bulb to burn brightly using two standard AA size batteries. The bad news is that each one only lasted about a half second before being destroyed. I had no idea how sensitive these LEDs were to a couple of low voltage batteries. There is no special electronics built into the light sets to convert A/C to DC so, instead of trying to power the sets with batteries (DC), I started to look for a portable A/C power source.
I used Google and found this old page describing Battery-Powered Christmas Lights. This was great encouragement for me but the page is clearly outdated. The author has stopped updating the page and has even specifically asked that people not contact him with questions. That was disappointing but I knew I was on the right path.
This took me to a new set of Google searches, looking for an inverter. I thought if I can find a cheap inverter to convert DC to A/C then all that I would need next is a battery pack, some wires, some soldering, etc, etc. It would be an expensive fragile mess but I was willing to do anything. I was still planning this in my head when I found the holy grail, a cheap portable rechargeable A/C power supply from Black & Decker. And it comes in three sizes: 10W (perfect for one 5W strand of 60 lights), 20W (this is what I eventually bought and used for my two strands) and 100W.
The power supply goes by the name "Power to Go". It's just what I need but it doesn't seem to be very popular. At least not yet. Here's a cached version of a page from Black & Decker. That's the closest thing to official support that I found. And I only found it available at Circuit City and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart definitely has the lower prices. Here are the maximum load rating in Watts, overall power ratings and the Wal-Mart prices.
Availability is also a factor. I had to use the "Find in Store" feature from each store's web site to locate the nearest store where the power supplies are actually available. The nearest Circuit City for me is an hour away. The nearest Wal-Mart was a thirty minute drive, past many other Wal-Marts along the way. Good luck to you if you decide to buy your own. Below I also list a link to a new similar product from Duracell as one more option.
All that remained was installing the lights, charging the power supply (about 17 hours the first time) and plugging it all together. Waiting was the hardest part for me. Waiting and resisting the urge to tell my girlfriend my secret plan.
My sons took care of installation.
For a while I worried about where to install the power supply on the bike. Then I remember that it came with a draw string bag. I hung the bag on the handlebar between the hand grip and the bell. That was the only requirement for my sons, they had to leave the plug dangling by the front handle bars so that it would reach the power supply.
There was a brief drum roll reminiscent of Chevy Chase's scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation as I plugged in the lights. Except our lights worked (whew!) and we were off down the road, lighting our own way through the night. My girlfriend loves it!
I estimate that the 20W power supply will last two hours before I need to recharge it. So far we've only used it for 90 minutes and it has worked perfectly. We plan to get a lot more use out of it over the next month or so.
Links:
This photo doesn't do it justice. It's not easy to capture Xmas lights with flash photography. Trust me, this bike catches people's attention as we ride around the neighborhood at night. We routinely have people call out "great bike" from their driveway or front proch. People roll down their windows as they watch us walk it across busy streets and call out "I love your lights". But one guy near the seedier part of downtown pretty well summed it up as he just said "great f***ing lights" as we rolled past him. This is one of my most successful projects.
I bought this tandem bike, a 30 year old Schwinn, off craigslist for $80 just a couple of months ago. My girlfriend and I love riding it around the city. But I've been waiting for the holiday displays to go up this weekend so we can cruise around at night and check out the Xmas lights. That's when it hit me to put the lights on the bike. Sort of like the scene in the A Charlie Brown Christmas TV special when the kids transferred the light display from Snoopy's doghouse to Charlie Brown's sad little Christmas tree. We turned a rusty, squeaky old bike into the most awesome bike ever.
The first step was to find some LED lights. I went to Target because I remembered seeing some small LED light sets there before. These were battery powered which is good but just big enough for a mantle or a table top size Xmas tree. That's really not want I wanted, too small, but I was desperate to make this dream come true.
I was shocked when I ran into full sets of Xmas lights at Target using LEDs. The price is $12 for a standard size set of 60 lights. That may be a high price to anyone else but to me it was the best bargain in the store. Everything I needed to know was printed on the box: draws one tenth the power of standard lights, 5 Watts instead of 50 Watts. Plus the LED bulbs last 20 times longer. I bought two sets for a total of 120 multi-color bulbs even though I had no idea how I would power the lights on the bike.
My first attempt to power the lights at home was pretty pathetic. I experimented with a couple of the extra bulbs provided with each set. The good news is that I got each bulb to burn brightly using two standard AA size batteries. The bad news is that each one only lasted about a half second before being destroyed. I had no idea how sensitive these LEDs were to a couple of low voltage batteries. There is no special electronics built into the light sets to convert A/C to DC so, instead of trying to power the sets with batteries (DC), I started to look for a portable A/C power source.
I used Google and found this old page describing Battery-Powered Christmas Lights. This was great encouragement for me but the page is clearly outdated. The author has stopped updating the page and has even specifically asked that people not contact him with questions. That was disappointing but I knew I was on the right path.
This took me to a new set of Google searches, looking for an inverter. I thought if I can find a cheap inverter to convert DC to A/C then all that I would need next is a battery pack, some wires, some soldering, etc, etc. It would be an expensive fragile mess but I was willing to do anything. I was still planning this in my head when I found the holy grail, a cheap portable rechargeable A/C power supply from Black & Decker. And it comes in three sizes: 10W (perfect for one 5W strand of 60 lights), 20W (this is what I eventually bought and used for my two strands) and 100W.
The power supply goes by the name "Power to Go". It's just what I need but it doesn't seem to be very popular. At least not yet. Here's a cached version of a page from Black & Decker. That's the closest thing to official support that I found. And I only found it available at Circuit City and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart definitely has the lower prices. Here are the maximum load rating in Watts, overall power ratings and the Wal-Mart prices.
- 10W 700mAh $20
- 20W 2Ah $40
- 100W 4Ah $70
Availability is also a factor. I had to use the "Find in Store" feature from each store's web site to locate the nearest store where the power supplies are actually available. The nearest Circuit City for me is an hour away. The nearest Wal-Mart was a thirty minute drive, past many other Wal-Marts along the way. Good luck to you if you decide to buy your own. Below I also list a link to a new similar product from Duracell as one more option.
All that remained was installing the lights, charging the power supply (about 17 hours the first time) and plugging it all together. Waiting was the hardest part for me. Waiting and resisting the urge to tell my girlfriend my secret plan.
My sons took care of installation.
For a while I worried about where to install the power supply on the bike. Then I remember that it came with a draw string bag. I hung the bag on the handlebar between the hand grip and the bell. That was the only requirement for my sons, they had to leave the plug dangling by the front handle bars so that it would reach the power supply.
There was a brief drum roll reminiscent of Chevy Chase's scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation as I plugged in the lights. Except our lights worked (whew!) and we were off down the road, lighting our own way through the night. My girlfriend loves it!
I estimate that the 20W power supply will last two hours before I need to recharge it. So far we've only used it for 90 minutes and it has worked perfectly. We plan to get a lot more use out of it over the next month or so.
Links:
# posted by John Mudd @ 6:51 AM 
