What makes a great bike light?

Core Principles of Design

When designing our bike lights, we engineer each light from the ground up since we have years of experience from the automotive and LED lighting industry.

While each of our bike lights has it’s own purpose such as helmet mounting, trail riding, or road riding, we still follow a few basic design principles that we feel set our lights apart from others on the market. Let’s take a look at the design targets that we aim for on each light:

1. Holistic approach to a bicycle focused light
2. Beam Patterns and light requirements
3. Runtime and battery strategies
4. Thermodynamic performance
5. Mounting Systems
6. Simple user interfaces

Please note. This is a LONG and detailed discussion, but we feel it's important to understand why we did things the way we did.

Holistic Approach to Design

There are obviously thousands of different bike lights on the market, but very few are designed from the start to be specifically for bike riding.

Many are built as flashlights, and then given something to mount onto a handlebar, and calling it a great bike light. While flashlights are great for walking in the woods or poking around the house, most don’t work well for the intensity of biking.

Most lights also only seem to focus on lumen values, which as we’ll see, doesn’t really tell us much about how good a bike light will be.

We’ll admit right up front, we won’t be the lightest, the brightest, or even the longest lasting light on the market. We don’t care to try and be the “best” in any specific category, because doing that compromises other criteria that is important for a high performing lamp.

For example, to have the brightest lumen level, you need a huge battery pack, a huge heat sink, and going to end up with very short battery life.

Or a light that overheats so quickly that you only get a few minutes at that “boost” level. So you end up with a light that sounds impressive, but it's heavy and can only perform at that high output for a few minutes. Not so great when you have a two hour ride planned…

So, when we develop our high-performance bike lights we are looking to balance the ideal beam pattern for the specific type of riding.

How many lumens we need to hit those lighting targets, how much runtime we want to have, and then how much battery will be required to hit that reasonable runtime target.

From there it’s a design approach of maximizing the heat sink to not only run cool, but stay compact and be easy to use. What it results in is a light that is designed specifically for your needs as a biker, and our customer reviews show how important and game-changing that actually is.

Runtime & Battery Strategy

Once we have our beam pattern defined, we know our target lumens required, and then can figure out how much battery we need to meet those targets.

We know that bike riders need solid consistent output since we are going on longer rides. So we develop our runtimes to user friendly instead of trying to hit the “industry standard” FL1 rating.

You’ll see this standard written on a lot of lights, but here is a quick explainer as to why we don’t like it:

Advertised Lumens = The average lumen value during the first THREE minutes of the light being turned on. No mention of light output after this 3 minute grace period.

Runtime = The time to go from 100% output to 10%. Period. No definition of the rate or curve that a light should follow.

What this means is that a light can have a “FL1 certified” lumen value of 2500 lumens, and a runtime of 40 minutes. Which one would assume is 40 minutes of 2500 lumen output, but in reality the high 2500 lumen output is available for 4-5 minutes to meet the FL1 standard.

Then it throttles back hard to some arbitrary value that’s about 50-60% the original stated output, and then lasts until the battery dies.

We feel this is very misleading, and not accurate in the slightest. So when we report our runtimes we are reporting a very real, solid output. We also give all our runtimes in a graph format so that it is easier to see what is expected out of the light rather than a reported number.

This also means that when spec shopping, or trying to compare the reported lumen and runtime specs from other lights to what we report, we’ll always seemingly fall short.

Though we don’t care.

We would rather have an honestly reported number because no one wants to be caught out by surprise in the middle of the woods with no light, or falling short of expectations on brightness.

Thermodynamics & Heat

The other real major challenge with developing bike lights is balancing mass with thermal performance.

We all know that lights get hot.

If lights get too hot then the LED efficiency drops quickly, as well as the safety issue of touching such a hot lamp since it can result in burns.

For our higher power bike lights we spread the heat load by using multiple lower lumen chips along with hours of thermodynamic simulations to optimize the housings to disperse heat as quickly as possible.

We also use innovative materials such as thermally conductive plastics and magnesium since the entire thermodynamic problem isn’t isolated to one material having a high thermal conductivity.

Air speed, surface area, convection, etc are all parts of the equation.

So we try and increase surface area through fins, and improve the air speed via pass-through vents on lights such as Trail Evo. It results in a very thermally efficient light that improves runtime and overall performance.

Bike Light Mounting Systems

A great bike light for a bike is useless if we can’t have it securely mounted! We’ve all had that frustrating issue of a light falling down or vibrating hard when riding chunky trails, or hitting potholes on the street.

Our first light, the Trail and Road Edition relied on a heavy duty silicone strap. When we developed Trail Evo we knew we wanted an extremely robust mounting solution that was easy to mount and would be repeatable.

The standard quick release mount that we engineered borrows design cues from high end DSLR camera mounts. Where a rotary cam is pushed onto a standardized "foot" on our lights to create a strong locking mechanism that can adapt over time as parts wear out.

Thick glass reinforced nylon mounting points and serrated teeth for the angle adjust help keep the mount stable as a rock during the harsh forces that a light will experience.

We continually iterate and improve the mounting experience because we know it’s an often overlooked part of bike light design, and if we are going to have a great bike light, we need a great mount.

For example, we've recently introduced a thumbscrew to make angle adjustments on the trail no longer need a tool.

Simple User Interface

Lastly, we need to develop the light to be simple and easy to use. We know our bike lights are often used in the short days of winter when thick riding gloves are worn.

So when we engineer the buttons, we want just a large single press button that is easy to press, and easy to locate even in the dark with gloves on.

We only have 4 modes, high-medium-low, and an “Adaptive” mode which slowly throttles brightness over a 30-45 minute period as your eyes adapt to the darkness.

This results in a light that “feels” brighter for a longer period of time, that falls between the medium and high total runtimes.

Flashing modes are included and can be accessed from the power off state. It always confused us that some lights have flashing modes in between the high-medium-low cycles. Nothing more frustrating than being in the middle of the woods with a strobing light!

All our modes also include a 20 minute “Get home mode” where the light output is significantly reduced and the end of battery life to give you a chance to get out of the woods.

Even when the battery is going to die, we pulse the light for 15 seconds to make it very clear that the battery is going to die, and you need to slow down or stop what you are doing to prepare for it.

We absolutely don’t want you to be bombing down a downhill only to have the light suddenly turn off. So we try to do all we can to make you aware that the lamp is about to turn off.