So, I had soldered the LEDs in 4 parallel rows with 3 lights in series in each branch. The rated voltage for the indicator is 12V, but when I measured the voltage with a multimeter, it never was more than 10V. With each LED rated at 3V, the series connection was good for only 9V, but I still went ahead and connected it up.
Sadly, the lights survived for only half a day – most of them had burned out by the time I checked in the evening while coming back from work. The reasons can be one of the two –
1. higher voltage than the circuit was rated for
2. huge voltage fluctuations in the input supply – this was the reason I had not put up the lights even after I had the circuit ready. Sometimes there would not be any power even! I’d planned to get my mechanic to see it once, but then got bored of seeing the complete circuit sitting on my table for so long. I think I’ll have to connect a resistor in series in all the branches to make sure this doesn’t happen again.<\/p>\n
Of course, i’ll be building another set of lights. This time i’ll try with multiple colors, I think white would not be very visible in daylight. Also maybe try lighting each row up one after the other.<\/p>\n
Next DIY project – powered boat from a tetrapack juice can.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ok, here’s what they look like. Yeah I know, they could’ve looked better. So, I had soldered the LEDs in 4 parallel rows with 3 lights in series in each branch. The rated voltage for the indicator is 12V, but when I measured the voltage with a multimeter, it never was more than 10V. With…<\/span><\/p>\nRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[31,30,27],"yoast_head":"\nDIY project - LED indicators for bike - Ajay Reddy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ajaymreddy.com\/diy-project-led-indicators-for-bike\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DIY project - LED indicators for bike - Ajay Reddy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ok, here’s what they look like. Yeah I know, they could’ve looked better. So, I had soldered the LEDs in 4 parallel rows with 3 lights in series in each branch. The rated voltage for the indicator is 12V, but when I measured the voltage with a multimeter, it never was more than 10V. 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