29
zymk
6y

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

Comments
  • 3
    What kind of led uses that much power =)
  • 1
    @ravijojila It's not led, it's a EL (electro-luminescence) wire. Google it. Basically phosphor core wrapped with a thin copper coil, glows when subject to high frequency AC.
  • 1
    @N0-Flux-Given my bad, i misread.
  • 1
    @ravijojila yeah the Battery life is cap because there is a tiny inverter (I think that’s what it’s called) that coverts the 3.7vDC to 120vAC for the EL wire to light up. I’m thinking that the inverter circuitry might not be super efficient cause even the default double-AA battery layout only lasted like 8-10 hours and I think they were 2200-2500 mAh batteries in parallel. (?)

    I’m a serious noob at this, and I can’t remember off the top of my head right now, if series or parallel doubles capacity and keeps the single battery voltage?
  • 1
    @TerraNimbus-io You could measure the voltage of the cell when it is empty", if the voltage is around 3.1 then the battery would be empty.

    Series = combined voltage and parallel = combined capacity.
  • 1
    @TerraNimbus-io Yep, also with parallel batteries you could draw more current (all more load) at same voltage.
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