Author Topic: IQ Cyo DC experiences  (Read 14334 times)

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #25 on: 10 February, 2011, 02:03:44 pm »
Do we take it that you've checked it with the battery connected on both polarities?
IIRC the B+M instructions said that there was a specific way to connect, even though it normally takes AC

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #26 on: 10 February, 2011, 02:47:27 pm »
I am surprised you need a brighter light than a Cyo - is there a lot of street lighting? Don't get me wrong, it's never a bad thing, but I found that the even 2x Ixons on top of a Cyo wasn't a huge improvement in brightness - it was spreading what light there was around that made it helpful. Indeed, I've found on unlit lanes, just 2x Ixons on the 10lux setting is plenty on known roads, even descending at 60kph. FWIW, mine are mounted down on the low rider mounts, so they are set quite horizontal, so pick our road imperfections at quite a distance. At 2xIxons on the 40lux, I am told I look like a motorbike.

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #27 on: 10 February, 2011, 02:58:22 pm »
I think it's putting out a fraction of the light it should - my understanding is that the draw on a dynamo hub is ~500mA, but I'm only seeing 190mA. Also, it's visibly less bright than a three year old entry-level asymetric beam headlight, which shouldn't be right  :facepalm:

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #28 on: 25 February, 2011, 11:28:44 am »
Just an update - last night I did a big loop to extend my commute home on a fancy. As a result I had the chance to give the Cyo a more demanding test riding along the unsealed surface of the Union Canal in inky darkness. Without the slightest hint of street lights or other riders, this was my first chance to be brutally honest about the Cyo's capabilities at 190mA.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. There is plenty of light to ride at 15mph and I was still fairly happy at 20mph. I think if I'd had my old light for comparison I might have preferred it, but it was certainly bearable.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this option unless you explicitly want a long-runtime not-so-bright light (but then it did cost £35). If it could be switched to draw an amp like MTB lights but with the same reflector, it would be an all-out win.

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #29 on: 16 March, 2011, 08:41:43 am »
Further follow up:

Not so good.

I rode with the Cyo on a couple of 200's and on many commutes, and was rather satisfied. Last couple of days I've had trouble with it refusing to light up properly (comes on super dim, like a cheap LED blinkie).

I thought perhaps my old Ay-Up lipol battery might simply be dying, so last night I tried swapping it with another, but no better.

Fair enough, I thought - I can try this with a 6 cell NiMH (7.2v) RC battery. Again, no dice, so it looks like something in the light has broken.

However, I was able to get it to light up easily at full brightness through the tail light connectors. Gambling that the tail light could handle it, I wired both lights in parallel (by poking the battery wires into the tail light connectors along with the headlamp wires!) and WIN. Back in business.

However this morning by the time I got to work, the Cyo was not lighting up at all, although the taillight was chugging away quite happily. So either the Cyo is fully broken now, or the voltage of the battery has fallen below some kind of threshold required to get any light at all (which sounds plausible to my non-electrical brain...)

Either way, looks like I might need to take it apart and wire up the LED directly.

Does anyone know what the design voltage of dynamo taillights are, please? My google-fu is weak (or I'm not hitting the right sites) and I like the toplight line plus enough to want to preserve it...


LittleWheelsandBig

  • Whimsy Rider
Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #30 on: 16 March, 2011, 08:50:02 am »
Incandescent dynamo taillights are 0.6 watts, used with 2.4 watt headlights, all nominally 6 volts of course.

There are some LED headlights that are happy being driven on DC, Inoled for one. IanH sells them.
Wheel meet again, don't know where, don't know when...

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #31 on: 16 March, 2011, 09:13:38 am »
Yes - B&M document the use of DC power in the manual of the IQ Cyo, which is what gave me the idea to buy one (since I don't own a dynamo).

So the tail-light is expecting 6V, I guess it will be tasting as much as 7.5v - wonder if it will nuke. It certainly hasn't been a problem for an hour this morning, so perhaps it's just a case of LED life in the millions of hours, rather than billions.  :)

The next question is - should I try to run the Cyo LED at a full 1000mA, or hold back with a 700mA driver? I guess the question is how good is the heatsinking...

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #32 on: 16 March, 2011, 11:47:07 pm »
I'll keep updating since somebody other than myself may well want to run a dynamo rig from DC:

After a forum appeal, I met up with another Edinburgh rider who has a dynohub, to poke my Cyo wires onto his prongy bits. To my surprise, although dead to the world of DC, the light behaved impeccably with AC. I have no idea how it can have half-broken.

My trouble with powering via the taillight leads, however, was simply battle damage between the tail light and the lamp  :facepalm:

Aaaanyway.....

At 8.2V from the fully-charged NiMH pack, the tail light still draws just 40mA - the same as at the nominal voltage. This encourages me that it will not be adversely affected, since to my layman's eye, if there's no more current, there oughtn't to be any more heat.

Second, at 8.2V the Cyo itself now draws ~290mA - well up on the ~190mA it drew at 7.4V (I recall this was predicted by someone up thread).  :thumbsup:

The NiMH is looking like a bit of a win. For about £7 a pop you can pick up a new RC 6 cell which will drive the combined lighting system for a healthy 12 hours.

Kim

  • Timelord
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Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #33 on: 17 March, 2011, 12:02:06 am »
I wouldn't worry too much (within reason) about what voltage you apply to (LED) tail lights.  They're going to be designed to cope with the scarily high (several tens of volts) voltages you can get from a lightly loaded dynamo, so are likely to be doing something with zeners and resistors to keep the magic smoke where it belongs.  The likely failure mode is overheating the zener clamp (assuming a very simple linear design), and it's going to take a lot more than 125% of the rated voltage to do that.

I agree that if it's drawing the same current, it's going to be okay.

Interesting, though not entirely surprising, that the Cyo worked fine with AC...

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #34 on: 16 August, 2011, 10:18:45 pm »
Because the eve of PBP is a great time to put your lighting system in jeopardy, I experimented with the voltage tolerance of the Cyo. I'm using an AA battery holder for the event since it's easy to buy AA's and harder to recharge stuff, and I tried 6x Lithium AAs.

I measured a voltage of 9.8V being drawn at which point the Cyo was burning through 500mA.

It didn't seem to get hot or complain in any way, but for the sake of prudence on the eve of a 1200k, I shorted one of the holder positions with a wire to give a five cell battery at 8.2V.

Just another data point for general bemusement.

JJ

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #35 on: 06 August, 2012, 04:09:17 pm »
In case it's of any help to anyone.  As my SON is KO for the moment, for my ride down to meet up with the family after work on Friday night , I used 5 Evolta hybrid AAs in series on my Cyo N Plus (60 Lux version).  I used my little Cateye backup lights for going through London, so I didn't light up properly until about 10 pm.

I was expecting about 3 hours, but in fact they were still giving me good light at 3 am when I arrived (It took me a good two hours longer than I hoped).  The light is not quite as bright as when running the dynamo, but easily enough for riding.

The cells started out at about 1.45 V with the pack giving about 6.8 V (where does the rest go?) with the light off, and about 6.6 with it on.  I forgot to check them before I put them on to recharge last night.

They were housed in a Maplins 8-gang battery box with 3 slots shorted out, and +ve wired to the earth (white stripe) wire on the Cyo.

One last thing.  The rear B&M 4D Light only lights up 2 of its 4 LEDs.  I am waiting to see whether I have damaged it, or whether it is something to do with AC vs DC.

On the whole it seems like a workable backup solution although I would rather run with the SON and not have to think about it.  No doubt you could run 6 or more cells for a brighter light, but I'd just as soon stay on the safe-but-adequate side.

Hope this helps someone.

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #36 on: 06 August, 2012, 04:29:55 pm »
One last thing.  The rear B&M 4D Light only lights up 2 of its 4 LEDs.  I am waiting to see whether I have damaged it, or whether it is something to do with AC vs DC.

Mebbe not much help wrt a dynamo - but my 4D senso-multi-whatever (used battery-only) lights all 4 with fresh batteries, but only 2 when they're getting low.

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #37 on: 19 August, 2013, 06:02:04 am »
Anyone used one of the new Luxos B lights with a battery pack like this? I'm too cheap for a dynamo and I really like my dura ace hubbed front wheel, but want a good light. I'm happy to wire it up myself with a 6xAA battery pack.

Would the voltage vs mah usage be similar to the Cyo, given they are both designed to run off the same dynamos? That's probably a stupid assumption given the LEDs will be new and no doubt the circuitry  :-\

I've ordered a cheap multimeter off ebay so I can check voltages in places, and I guess I can check the current draw when it is hooked up a running?

Oh yeah, should I start a new thread for this?

Cheers,
Adam

Kim

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Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #38 on: 19 August, 2013, 01:00:31 pm »
Looking at the manual:

Quote
Please note: The headlight can only be powered by a dynamo (AC).
Connection to a DC power source (battery) is not possible.
Only special e-bike versions of the LUXOS E can accept DC power from 15
to 75 V. Please ask your specialised retailer.

Given that the Cyo manual explicitly specifies voltage and polarity for DC operation, I'm not optimistic.

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #39 on: 19 August, 2013, 02:10:59 pm »
RTFM Adam.

Thanks for that! That would have been embaressing if I bought that, fiddled with it, and it didn't work, or worse I busted its electronics.

Oh well, I'll go the cheaper Cyo route instead aka this thread :-)

Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #40 on: 20 August, 2013, 09:35:27 am »
Looking at the manual:

Quote
Please note: The headlight can only be powered by a dynamo (AC).
Connection to a DC power source (battery) is not possible.
Only special e-bike versions of the LUXOS E can accept DC power from 15
to 75 V. Please ask your specialised retailer.

Given that the Cyo manual explicitly specifies voltage and polarity for DC operation, I'm not optimistic.

Possibly something to do with the circuitry that reads the frequency of pulses from the dynamo, then changes the beam pattern depending on your speed? Question is, does this get fried or merely confused by a DC supply?

Kim

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Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #41 on: 20 August, 2013, 11:56:17 am »
Possibly something to do with the circuitry that reads the frequency of pulses from the dynamo, then changes the beam pattern depending on your speed? Question is, does this get fried or merely confused by a DC supply?

Ah yes, that would make sense.  Being stuck in nearfield mode seems likely, at the very least.

Cobbling together a low-loss H-bridge and oscillator (if that would even work) is well into the territory of more effort than fitting a dynamo.  Especially given the price of bottle dynamos.

Kim

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Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #42 on: 22 October, 2013, 03:21:06 pm »
To add a datapoint:

I'm in the process of adding electric assist to barakta's trike.  With a large battery and regenerative hub motor, this will make the existing bottle dynamo redundant.  My plan is to use a high-efficiency switching regulator to step down the buss voltage to something appropriate for the existing dynamo lighting (a 60lux Cyo N Senso Plus and a pair of Spanninga Pixeos).

To that end, I disconnected the dynamo and hooked up a bench power supply to confirm it should work.  Taking care to observe the correct polarity (DC positive to the earth - black wire with the white stripe - on the Cyo), I fed it the recommended 7.2V, and observed that all lights illuminated and the sensor and respective stand-light functions worked as normal.  Slowly tweaking the voltage up to the 7.5V recommended maximum, I observed a *dramatic* increase in light output.  I briefly went to 7.7V, but didn't see much of a change in brightness.  Removing the power source would cause the Cyo to dim to standlight brightness within a second or so.  Steady-state current at 7.5V was of the order of 300mA for all three lights, and output was comparable to that when driven by the dynamo at 12mph+ (I didn't go as far as deploying the turbo trainer and wiring for A/B testing).  The Cyo didn't appear to be getting particularly warm.

I conclude that the Cyo is *very* fussy about voltage when fed by a DC voltage source, and wouldn't be surprised if component tolerances play a part.  If I were building a battery pack for one, I'd want to use a regulator.

My plan is to use a AG8105 PoE regulator module to drop the nominal 48V (actual 52V+) battery voltage to 7.5V for the lights.  Measured efficiency is about 88% at these loads.  The 20Ah battery should be able to run the lights continuously for about 2 weeks if you don't ride anywhere  :)

mmmmartin

  • BPB 1/1: PBP 0/1
    • FNRttC
Re: IQ Cyo DC experiences
« Reply #43 on: 30 October, 2016, 07:00:18 pm »
Thanks Kim. Funnily enough, your name was mentioned to me by a friend as we were discussing my wobbly dynohub and the possibility of running my Cyo from batteries. Having read your posts I'm not going to try that route. And TBH given the distance I've had from the Shimano dynamo, replacing like-with-like is a reasonable option.
Besides, it wouldn't be audacious if success were guaranteed.