I am going to connect it like this: 16s flux deck build - #16 by Ean.esk8
2 Likes
Has there been any sort of consensus or highly recommended front lights for mountainboarding, which are perfect for attaching to a bull bar? I just received a bull bar set from Trampa and am in the market for a strong/powerful light coming from my bull bar which will thus allow me to finally add my davega where my previous light solution was.
1 Like
Bump
No. A relay does.
general consensus is that any 20W-120W light from aliexpress will do. Note that most of the smaller lights will likely overheat after a certain period, and some of the bigger lights sometimes need taking apart so you can add thermal paste behind the pcb to increase heat disipation.
The No.1 thing that breaks on mtb lights is usually the mount funnily enough.
Usually cast metal or cheap aluminium, it cracks and breaks under vibration, but this all depends on the manufacturer and isn’t a big deal to fix so i wouldn’t stress about that.
To calculate how many Amps your light will pull is very simple.
you take your volatage, usually 12-24v on a buck or 44v on a 12 battery, and you divide that by the amount of W the led pulls.
Take this light for example that seems good
so if you have a buck running at 24v
24V ÷ 50W = ~0.50A
I think 5A is really the max you want to pull from a light, otherwise it starts becoming a bit much.
And the last thing is wide angle is favourable over spot light
Why?
Having a light on a skateboard is just so low that the spot light isn’t effective… or at least not without blinding everyone but the FOV really isn’t great from so low.
Having an ultra bright light low to the ground also isn’t great because the glare will blind you (mine does this). So no point getting a 200w light, 50w is plenty already!
Hope this was a helpful guide
3 Likes
4 Likes
Thank you much!
1 Like
Mine hit a speed bump and broke might have lived with at wheels but the tb110 no chance. Now using 80v scooter light that bolt to kingpin.
Interested to see how it holds up. I’d imagine the kingpin sees similar vibrations to the hanger or bull bars.
I’m still loving my removable helmet light. Started getting dark the other day, stopped, bolted it on with the one thumb screw, and was off in about a minute.
1 Like
Does anyone remember what the lacroix headlights were?
I know for sure i found exact clones at some point but i can’t seem to nail the keywords on google anymore
1 Like
Maybe I missed it - did you say you built this? As in, had the custom pcba built and shipped?
The majority of the components on the BOM show as unavailable / no match found via the LCSC link. I’m curious about your experience building this.
2 Likes
Yes I ordered the PCBs from pcbway and assembled it myself it’s all through hole so easy as. Will do some pictures and guide if you are interested.
6 Likes
That would be excellent! I’ve never pulled the trigger on ordering a pcb, but I’d be comfortable soldering components and whatnot with a guide.
2 Likes
Yes! I want to make this too but I noticed it was out of stock too! I’d love a guide!
I was looking for mosfets with 12v Vgs,th because I will use 12v to turn on the mosfet but I cant find any. It seems that the Vgs,th is the very minimum for the mosfet to turn on and higher will make it even more on? I was going to get the FQP50N06 60V N channel mosfet. Is this okay because it says the Vgs,th is 2-4V so I don’t want to overwhelm it. I will use max 60v2A I guess because the stepdown converter after it will use 12V10A.
Shall I get a heatsink for the mosfet?
Correct.
You want the threshold voltage to be a lot lower than the gate voltage you will use. Just make sure that you do not go over the max gate voltage rating.
You can see that the Vgs-th is only at a very low current level by noting the 250uA drain (I-subD) current that the 2V-4V Vgs-th gives you.
There should be a graph in the datasheet showing you the current the MOSFET will pass at different gate voltages.
As long as you are well above the gate threshold voltage (so the MOSFET turns on fully and you get the least amount of heating) and below the max gate voltage rating you should be okay. If you are trying to switch a lot of current then you might need to dive into the graphs to make sure you can do that.
If you are above about half a watt of power being dissipated by the MOSFET you will need a way to get rid of the heat. Even at 0.25W it can get toasty.
Take the max Rds-on spec and double it. This resistance goes up as the MOSFET heats up. Then multiply the resistance when hot by the square of the current the MOSFET will switch. This will be the power the MOSFET has to dissipate.
For example. Let’s assume an Rds-on max of 10mOhm switching 2A. That would be 10mOhm * 2 = 20mOhm hot resistance.
The power loss would be 20mOhm * (2A * 2A) = 80mW. No heat sink needed.
2 Likes
will you be able to make a guide for us?
I want to make both these brake lights Arduino Based Brake light controller for UART based remote controls and this led strip Let there be ESK8 lights - #905 by Movation. Can I combine these and just use one Arduino to control both of these and have that Arduino powered by the uart port on my ubox spintend esc?
It seems like an accelerometer can be connected to an arduino and led strip like this: Make an LED Light Strip AHRS with Arduino and MPU-6050 - Projects and it looks like it doesnt use the port on the arduino that the brake light uses. Will the arduino be able handle controlling both of these? Like maybe i need the bigger sized arduino instead of pro-micro?
Ok, so a few things to unpack here
That first link never actually seemed to test the final product. It’s the Servisas guys, so could be great. But likely it will require software fine tuning, as all projects do. Also the buck converter he chose is only rated for 1A, so if you recreate it anyway, I hope you’re not planning on more than one board length strip of LEDs. You’ll want to check your current calcs.
The second link uses a custom pcb with an ESP32 (not quite Arduino, but close). Have you ever ordered a fully assembled custom pcb before? Additionally, if you dig deeper, most of the components on the BOM come up as question marks by that particular shop, so you’ll have to substitute or find similar parts. Again, hope you have some EE experience. The project hasnt been updated in some time, but you may be able to reuse the code.
Next - yes, you can use an Arduino to control individually addressable (“digital”) LED lighting. It’s a good, common solution. However, you probably don’t want to power your LED strips from the ubox spintend. If i remember correctly, its 12V port is rated at something like 3A. That could be enough, depends on how wild you want to go. If not you’ll need a dedicated buck converter rated for your battery’s voltage and higher current.
To get info from the uart, no matter the way you go about it, you’ll need to tap the RX pin of your VESC (like the first link).
With space inside an Esk8 enclosure at a premium, rather than buying an accelerometer breakout board and wiring it to the Arduino, just buy an Arduino with an IMU already on it. There should be a couple out there - one at least is the Nano 33 IoT.
With individually addressable LEDs, you can… individually… address… each pixel. So, yes, you can make half do fun glowy patterns and the other half react to uart inputs. It will take some work on the coding side of course. Any Arduino can easily control digital LED strips, if that’s all is doing.
If you’re not comfortable programming an Arduino you’re going to have a hard time making all of this happen. And definitely if you’ve never designed pcb schematics, don’t go ordering that custom pcb and expect it to work.
I’m happy to be wrong, but if you’re just starting out I would recommend start with a digital LED strip like Adafruit’s Neopixel or Dotstar, a run of the mill Arduino Nano / Micro, and get that glowing before going deeper.
4 Likes
I wont be able to make my own pcb, im considering that as an alternative only if b264 or someone else were to make a guide. My uart is full with the davega so the unclejohn recommended putting the ubox in ppm+uart mode and then I can get the signal for my break light and led strip from the servo line on the ppm port and this would reduce the burden of the esc’s transmission of throttle signals. Id go ahead and just use the other project but that uses uart so I need to figure out how to read from the ppm port instead and ill use the rest of that code.
I was initially going to get a 4-6 channel with remote but if I can just connect a reciever/transmitter to the Arduino uno then that would be nice. I have 6 different lights I want to control. (+1 horn connected to ubox). I will use the 12v light port of the esc output controlled by to turn off the dc-dc converter with a mosfet so it doesnt waste with quiescent current. This will turn of all lights and arduino. Alternatively, I can have it just turn off all lights but then power the arduino with 5v from ppm if I want the arduino to remain on whenever the vesc in on. The arduino transmitter receiver has 4 buttons so I will control 4 of the 6 lights with this extra remote. For the other 2 lights, could I use the throttle like a button to turn on/off the lights? Like if I pull on the breaks all the way 4x in a row it will turn on those 2 lights?
All the lights will be powered by the battery through the dc-dc converter (12v10a but can get 12v20a if needed) but they will be controlled by the arduino using mosfets. I have no idea where all this will connect on the arduino so will it have enough ports for me to also add the rf-reciever module?
1 Like