Triumph Trophy SE Auxiliary Lighting

As I have mentioned before the lighting on the TT provided no daytime visibility. I wasn't sure I needed a lot of extra nighttime lighting but I sure knew I needed some daytime running lights (DRL).

The problem was that I didn't want to drill holes in the fairing but I wanted the lights as high as was practicable.

I finally found a way to mount some lights in an appropriate place on the Trophy. As it turns out the lower plastic housing below the mirror is a sturdy piece of plastic with 3 mounting bolts. I decided this would support up to a 2 pound lamp.

The item you see is a NutSert. These are neat things that are similar to a pop rivet. They crimp in and provide a solid threaded nut. I put 2 in the housing, one at each end, so I could bolt an aluminum bar on the outside.

This bar is tapped and the lamp bracket bolt runs from the inside to the outside. This allows me to tighten the retaining nut without having access to the inside of the housing.

Here is a detail view of the finished mount.

Next up was to choose some lights. I contacted fellow LD Rider, Justin Phillipson who is in the lighting business at LED Rider. Justin is very knowledgeable and suggested I would be pleased with the Cyclops Long Range Optimus Spot so I ordered up a pair, one 10 degree beam and one 20 degree beam.

Justin also recommended the Skene dimmer so I visited their site to pick out a dimmer. I found just what I wanted with the IQ-175A Intelligent Lighting Controller. What I liked about this was that it has the alert feature that will flash the lights in an attention getting pattern (video follows).

While on the Skene site I saw their Photo Blaster DRL and decided to give them a try while I was at it. They were a bit on the pricey side, but I had already tried some cheap LEDs bar lights that were a waste of time. I figured you get what you pay for so put them in the shopping cart too.

When everything arrived I began the wiring project (previous post). I wanted to minimize the wire runs and complexity so had to choose where to mount the controller for the LED and the controller for the Photon Blasters (PB) wisely. The PBs have most of the wiring at the front so I mounted that controller inside the front fairing. You can barely see it mounted far forward on the frame.

The only rear running wires for this controller are a power circuit to the Fuzeblock.

The Skene dimmer had a bunch of wires but only two needed to run to the front so it got mounted back near the Fuzeblock. That's it just behind the label.

Both of these controllers were mounted with double sided foam tape.

Once everything was connected, and the bugs worked out of my wiring it was time to test out the lights to see how they performed. I haven't been out at night yet for a test but so far I'm pleased with the DRL aspect.

More pictures of the lighting mounts:

Here is the video. Note that the amber PB lights have a feature called Conspicuity Flicker. It looks to be about 30 cycles. In the video this frequency combines with the video rate and makes it look much slower, so what you are seeing here is not real world. The alert feature on the driving lights is activated by flashing the high beams twice within 1 second. The TT has a passing switch which flashes the high beam. This is perfect for the IQ-175A