Making a LED brake light

I did another experiment to use red LEDs for a break light. Those are

high-wattage and high efficiency type of LEDs and you can expect 1/25

of less power consumption compared with regular bulbs. You also can

expect longer life more than 50,000 hours and this is far longer than the

life of a car. If you drive a car for 200,000km with the average speed of

20km/H, you will spend 10,000 hours driving. There are not too many

people who drive a car this much in Japan. 50,000 hours are 5 times

more than the car's life and you don't need to worry about the LED's life

at all.

 

Although the LED has a higher efficiency, it is not 100% and you need a

heat sink to dissipate the power. The LED chips I obtained were already

mounted on a metal board and all I needed was just to cut the board and

connect and align each LEDs to get the best reflection when installed into

the brake light unit.

 

Below is the regular bulb and the LED unit which I made.

I installed the LED unit to Honda Life. ( Only right side for the experiment)

Below shows the comparison between the regular bulb (left) and the LED

unit (right).

 

As you see, the LED unit is slightly brighter than the regular bulb. Connecting

5 LEDs in series and 47 ohm get the current 70mA. The power consumption

is13.2V X 70mA = 0.924W.

The regular bulb consumes 21W and the power ratio is 21W / 0.924W = 22.73

With less than 5% of the original power consumption, you can obtain a brighter

red break light and much longer life. Thanks for the technology. I am now

converting other cars break lights.