Portable Sun

Portable battery powered handheld spotlight:

Spring 2019

In my early college years, I was enrolled in a few night courses at my university, and would constantly be skateboarding home in absolute darkness. To solve this issue, I created the portable sun not only to illuminate the surroundings as I sped down the hilly streets of Pomona, but also to make sure I didn’t meet an unfortunate end by some car who didn’t see me.

Initially I designed the system to run off of a 4s battery that was boosted to the operational 32v, however this put extensive stress on the booster board, which would burn out after prolonged usage. Instead, I made friends with a lab technician and got my hands on some old 40v drill batteries. I then stepped these down to 32v using a buck converter, and added a secondary 12v circuit for the fan, and I ended up with what I call, the Portable Sun.

Using a wide angle lens, the light is excellent for illuminating the entire road area in front of me, and much more well beyond.

Given that the LED chip is around 100 watts in total, it kicks off some serious waste heat that needs to be effectively dealt with. To solve the issue of cooking the LED chip, I hard mounted it to an aluminum heat sink with a mounted cooling fan to disperse the generated heat. This fan does the job pretty well, but the open mount heat sink also gets passive cooling benefits from low Colorado ambient temperatures. It’s also worth mentioning that travelling at high speeds helps increase the rate of convection based cooling with this system.

So essentially what we have here is an overpowered spotlight that incentivizes high speed skateboarding at night to reach peak efficiency, what could possibly go wrong here?