chauvet Lighting Systems

randomdreams says:

Hey wow you *are* my doppelganger.
I've made some LED lights (since I'm an electrical engineer designing LED drivers.) Packaging them in, say, a trailer taillight enclosure is pretty good if you want a regulation-sized light. A lot of our chips (LM3402, 3409, in particular) do a really super job of driving 350mA LED's at high efficiency and have a dim pin that you can toggle fast, to get dimming, or slow to get both dimming and a strobe effect.
One thing we (most of my coworkers are pretty serious bicyclists, too) have been talking about is a more complicated lighting system: as bright as possible, maybe in the 1000 lumens range, just before and at dusk, probably strobing, so that people can see us, and then dimming back to maybe 500 lumens when it's good and dark because 500lm is almost overwhelmingly bright and you might as well get the extra battery life. We've been playing with some small controllers for this, using photodiodes, so they automatically handle lighting conditions and auto-turn-off if you're not in motion and haven't been for over 3 minutes.
One thing I've found with DIY LED lighting systems on vibration-prone platforms is that it's a good idea to, when you finish and test the circuit board, dip the whole thing in epoxy. That keeps anything from moving and helps reduce corrosion. The first and second set of LED lights I made (one for a friend's pinzgauer rear lights, the other for my trailer) had many of the LED's fail when they jolted loose from the board, despite massive solderjoints. The epoxy-dipped ones have been running, in one case, for 2 years without failure.