Bike Hack – How to Add a Stepper Motor Powered LED Light!

I’ve seen a ton of bike lights that use the power of pedaling to provide bikers with nice array of lights as they drive down the road.  Well, here’s another awesome bike hack that shows you how to add a stepper motor-powered LED light.  I really like this one as I do actually have a bunch of unused stepper motors laying around. (and I am sure you do too if you hack around a bit…)

Steppers come with different resolutions. Virtually all steppers are either 1.8° or 7.5° per step; (200 steps or 48 steps per revolution) the difference can be felt easily if you turn the spindle by hand. The 1.8° ones are obviously better for generating at really low revs, but also ‘top out’ lower. The coils in steppers have a relatively large inductance, and beyond a certain speed the output frequency gets so high that the impedance of the coils starts to become significant and limits the current. When making a stepper based generator, you need to keep the motor speed to around a couple of hundred revs per minute – something like the normal speed of a bicycle wheel.

via make

video://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ56emEBF4s

stepper-motor-diy

One Response to Bike Hack – How to Add a Stepper Motor Powered LED Light!

  1. uirobot says:

    UIrobot featured Stepper Motor Controllers size only 42.3mm*42.3mm*13.5mm which include Parallel, Serial and CAN Protocol type Stepper Controllers for directly mounting onto size 42/57/86/110 and so on stepper motors. Super compact volume, high performance, standalone or integral usage, easy wiring, strong driving force are the feature of our products. Till now on, UIM stepper controller can use 10V-40V DC supply and drive 8 amps. High voltage supply to 80V and 32, 64 microstepping is coming to the market very shortly.

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