The 10W LED Hand Lamp
Here’s a gadget I finished some time ago: A 10 watts LED hand lamp with dimmer.
About a year ago, I bought a 10W LED from china, more or less just for fun. It turned out that these things are incredibly bright and so I used it sporadically as room lighting for some time. Then I got those lipo-batteries for my quadrocopter and thought: “Why not build a hand lamp from this?”. So here it is!
(yeah, I know it could be done better, but hey, it works!)
This case contains:
- The LED including heat sink
- The battery
- The LED driver (which I also bought when I bought the LED)
- The “controller board”, which converts the voltage from a potentiometer to a PWM signal, which is fed into the driver. Additionally, it measures the battery voltage and turns on a warning LED and a beeper (which sounds like a smoke alarm, just a little less loud :-D ) if the voltage drops below 9.3V.
One battery charge will last for about 2 hours at full power. In reality, it will last much longer, as full power is much too bright for normal use at night (20% is mostly enough, so you get 10 hours of light). By the way: The photo on the left was shot at the lowest possible output power. If it wasn’t the whole picture would be black ;-) .
Another great thing is that this LED has a very homogeneous light distribution over it’s 120° aperture angle. So, if you carry this thing pointing straight forward, everything you see is brightly illuminated :-) .