LED Flashlight From Garage Door Remote

After seeing the neat little flashlights you could build with just a bright white LED, a resistor, some batteries and a switch, like the TicTac flashlight, the mouse flashlight and the PVC flashlight I decided to try my hand at an LED flashlight.

After building a couple of TicTac flashlights that were happily received by the boys, I ran across a couple of old key chain garage door remotes that were left over after replacing an old garage door opener. I opened one of the remotes up and found that it used a 12V battery and that 7.5V was easy to get between the main opener switch and the battery, I hit upon using 2 13,000mcd bright white LEDs from Alan Parekh in series with a small resistor since I had the power.

Everything was very simply done. After marking the locations in the case where I wanted the LEDs to mount, I took the circuit board from the case, snapped the case back together and used a drill press to make the two holes. I then soldered the LEDs in series to fit the mouting holes, added the resistor and a little electrical tape to prevent shorts and there you have it.

We used one on a very dark walk through a boy scout camp and it threw a very usable circle of light for our little trip. It seemed much brighter than some of the other flashlights, but that could just be an artifact of the bright white LEDs.

Friday September 1, 2006   ·   Permalink

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