Bike Lights: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tom Place is the co-owner and head of Product Development for Outbound Lighting (outboundlighting.com). He’s a former Cree LED manager and holds multiple LED chip design patents.
In this episode, we ask Tom to fill us in on how bike lights work, and how we can get the most out of our setup for night riding.
- What is the ideal beam shape for trail riding? Are certain beam patterns better than others depending on where you ride (eg. wide open desert vs. thick forest)?
- How does light placement affect the beam shape?
- What’s the theory behind helmet vs. bar mounted lights? If you only have one light, is it better to be on the bars or the helmet?
- Can brightness make up for an inefficient or poor beam shape?
- Why shouldn’t buyers focus on lumen numbers? Which features can buyers look at to compare bike lights?
- How do you determine the optimal battery size for a bike light?
- Why do LED lights produce so much waste heat? Is there better tech on the horizon?
- What could cause a poorly designed or manufactured light to pose a safety risk?
- Do you have any tips for night riding?
✏️ A written transcript of this conversation is available at singletracks.com.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hello Kitty and friends are teaming up for the ultimate collab. |
| 0:08.0 | Joining your little ones on a fun-fueled adventure. Some fun, some food, it's all inside this Happy Meal. |
| 0:16.0 | Until the 2nd of February from 11am includes one pre-selected book or toy whilst it's last. |
| 0:20.0 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my guest is Tom Place. |
| 0:27.2 | Tom is the co-owner and head of product development for outbound lighting. He's a former Cree LED |
| 0:33.1 | manager and holds multiple LED chip design patents. Thanks for joining us, Tom. Yeah, |
| 0:39.4 | happy to be here. So tell us a little bit about your professional background. Sounds like you've |
| 0:43.9 | been working with lights and LEDs for a while now. Yeah, I mean, I grew up with a lot of |
| 0:49.8 | lighting in my life because my dad did a lot of daylighting research as a professor, |
| 0:55.9 | but professionally started in 2011 at Cree, |
| 1:00.3 | major LED manufacturer in Durham, North Carolina. |
| 1:03.5 | I worked in the LED chip design, |
| 1:06.4 | fabrication side of the business, |
| 1:08.6 | and then moved into running our global applications engineering team, where we had a lab where we basically took in you know new products from big customers g panasonic and so on that were kind of pushing the envelope with either new optical technology or new construction methods, and they'd run into issues. |
| 1:28.5 | So they would send it to us to basically put it through testing |
| 1:32.5 | and figure out what we could do to improve it. |
| 1:35.5 | So we would take it, measure it, make some modifications, |
| 1:38.7 | re-measure it, and then send the results back |
| 1:41.8 | and basically give them guidance on, |
| 1:43.4 | all right, if you use this |
| 1:45.1 | different LED package design, or if you use this thermal interface material or this optic |
| 1:51.8 | construction, we can improve XYZ by whatever percent. |
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