Over on DinoFab, Dean shows off his latest bike improvement, an LED light system that uses a generator built from an old printer stepper motor. He points readers to this article about how to generate electricity using steppers.
8 thoughts on “Stepper motor bike light generator”
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I love it. I’ve always wanted an easy to make genie, and I’ve got plenty of busted printers laying about.
I guess adding a capacitor across the LED’s to act as charge storage, would provide some additional power during bike stoppages.
If you add some diodes to rectify the AC voltage output from the stepper to DC voltage, it gets easier to work with for charging batteries and caps. Just connect a small diode inline on each coil wire, then join all the outputs from the diodes. This is the positive side of the DC and the common wire from the stepper is the negative side.
“this article” in the paragraph is a broken link.