Ben's Website

Serious musings

Bike Helmet Head Light

I enjoy biking into Engineering every day and though not much of a problem today, the summer solstice, I like to see and be seen throughout the darker times.  I quite like my Planet Bike Blaze, a compact 2W bike light and its warble flash mode, but it's somewhat difficult to interface to my helmet.  So, this past weekend I finally replaced the fishing line version with a 3D printed pan/tilt mount.

Helmet pan/tilt light mount
Printed vs rendered

This design is simple and compact, consisting of three parts screwed together.  The gray disc is zip-tied to the helmet, with a concave surface and some VHB tape to help it conform to the helmet.  The two blue clips ride along a channel, providing the pan movement, with the screw hole creating the tilt axis.  The gray trapezoid receives the screws, with the light attaching to an imitation of the original handle bar mount.

If I hadn't printed in black, you would see in the above that I need to spend more time tuning my printer.  Though only a PrintrBot, I've seen many better results; hopefully I'll have printed some more things before this breaks and I need to redesign/reprint.

Also, this design would be a lot better if I had a 3D model of the helmet; lacking a 3D scanner I tried AutoCAD's 123D Catch cellphone scanner...but this is now offline

Crazy cool to have this in my pocket, but insufficient resolution to be useful for this project. So, a good quick project, but it's largely a stop-gap until I can build some lights into the helmet voids...