Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Custom Bike Frame Lighting – Kevin Warner, Peter Gould”.
Good afternoon i’m kevin warner with olympia, circuits and uh, we’ll be joined later with peter gold, my business partner with olympia circuits and the project. I’M here to show you is the arduino controlled bike lights. This is kind of a fun simple thing to do with arduino, that uh incorporates 3d printing rgb leds, uh arduino and some unique products that are available on the market. So this uh gives an idea what we’re uh, making it’s, basically just some frame lighting.
That will be moving in multi-color. That can accent the bike, make you more visible for safety or for just for fun. This is just one way.
We’Ll show you one way. We mounted it on the bike, but it could be mounted all sorts of other ways. Here’S a quick uh video that isn’t going to run we’ll show you the uh actual thing in a minute.
So what is it uh about? So the idea was to uh that peter came up with was to take the rgb led the ws 2811 slash 2812, that we like to play with, because they’re really simple to control with an arduino and add them to a bicycle. And so we uh we’ve been using these little uh backup batteries for uh usb as a power source for arduino for quite a while. So basically, what we’re gon na do is take the five volts from that.
That’S already regulated and run it straight to the leds and also power. The arduino board we’re using a little micro arduino which are really inexpensive. That’S uh! This is a 32u4 based board, so it’s got the usb built in makes it very tiny, very easy to put into projects just plug it into the with a mini or a micro, usb and power that um the rgbs are a strip of ws2812. So you can get all different sources.
These are 30 leds per meter, so it makes a nice system. I think we have 13 leds that that’s about the length of the top tube on an adult bike. You can easily power 16 of these, with the with the output of the battery probably could go up to 30 or 40 if you reduce the power in the code so – and this just takes a a simple connection – to run these um the uh the code to Them this is something that we just stumbled upon upon when we uh first mounted the lights directly to the bike frame and they looked pretty good, but they weren’t really diffusing the light. Well, so we dug around the garage – and this is actually white hdpe pipe, which is used for heating and running hot water and cold water and construction. Now it’s usually red green blue, different colors, but this is a white all we had to do to prep. It was uh sand off the printing that was on it and it uh. It makes a really cheap, uh, quite effective diffuser. We got some basic wire, we use phone cords, it’s nice and clean and a jacket and uh, and then the case we didn’t want to just zip tie it totally to the bike.
So it’s a it’s a slightly fancier zip tie method. So you got a base that will zip tie to the frame which will hold the controller and then a cover which snaps in to hold the battery. So the uh, i’m sure you’ve seen a lot about 3d printing, it’s a basic build. This is uh.
This went through about five iterations to get where it is now. Uh did the design in sketchup exported it and printed on mandel max, not too much special about it. This could be any sort of shape as long as it had enough space for the controller it currently is a very it isn’t intended to be watertight. It could be sealed up, but we wanted to keep it so it’s packable, and so it’s basically a fair weather device at this point.
So these lights are great. They come pre-assembled on a flexible strip. You don’t have to mess around soldering each led down the controller for the led is built into the light, so it doesn’t doesn’t take up much space, you just cut it to length and uh and then solder a ground, five volts and signal to the strip, and So we left it in the waterproof covering um, sealed it up with some hot glue, and that’s it that’s another one. That’S real basic! You can. This way you can have any sort of link that you want. As i said, you can control or power with a with an 800 milliamp source like this uh 16 at full power for the data sheet. But you can easily do many more than that in our experience and then the and then we just uh, connect make that connection and then, as you can see here, we just run to the raw, the ground and one of the output pins on the arduino micro. So the mounting this is where there’s lots of flexibility um.
You can put this on any of the tubes uh on the bike and um and then run the leds around the two uh peter had the idea of running around the front, the uh of the bike. So you can see it from the sides in the front and so on, uh or mounted in the uh in the pipe here’s how i have it set up on mine, so we i do have it so that the holes in the case are down so that It is if it does get wet. Hopefully it will will manage to the water to find a way out, so it doesn’t destroy any everything right away. Um i’ve hung these boards out in the weather. They will. They will work for a long time in damp conditions.
So uh not not not the best for them, but it’s uh if they happened to get stuck in a rainstorm, you’d, probably manage and then just using a velcro tie around everything to hold the battery in it’s. It loosely snaps into the case, but the velcro will make sure you don’t lose the parts have it caught in your spokes or something like that, and then here shows the leds inserted into the hdpe which is zip tied to the frame. So the programming is quite easy, because these are all addressable leds. You can create simple algorithms and arduino to do different lighting effects, so this is called a sine uh color wave and then this is a rgb fade. So it’s just gon na cycle a rainbow fade. Pardon me so it’s just gon na cycle through the rainbow and you can control the intensity of the colors, the range of the color, the brightness, always very simple, uh um settings in the uh, the functions that we have in the arduino code.
This is a chase effect we have it set up with uh, orange and blue. This is something that we use for christmas lighting. We use red and green across the front of the house.
You know it’s very easy to just move the colors one at a time with the with the math, and so this is what makes it great you can kind of make any sort of pattern you want to suit. You know what you want it for if you really want to be seen or you just want it, to look dramatic or match the color of the bike or whatever your your case may be. We use the fast spi library, which i think now is called the fast led library. It’S very robust works on a variety of arduino boards and makes all these function possible. These functions very easy to do, takes care of all the low-level communication between the arduino and the led strip.
So next steps um. This is, as you can tell, this is a pretty simple project, but the the next steps that we have in mind are adding a accelerator gyro. We use accelerator gyros for a variety of projects and we have a little breakout board that we make that we can add so that then we can respond to the motion of the bike and change the pattern actively on the fly so that it isn’t just a Set pattern: it has a motion that relates to what you’re doing and then the other thing that is something that peter’s worked on is uh. Having a color palette, chooser selector on android that you can uh set the patterns, you want and the activity and then and then dump that data to the arduino board and have it go in without having to dig into the arduino code each time you want to Change the settings and here’s some information about where you can get more information.
We’Ve got a project page on our website. That’S got the references to the code and the details of the project and, as i said, the library is now called fast led. It used to be fast fast, spi too anyways changed a lot. It’S very evolving. This uh, these ws 28 11’s, have been around for and actively adopted by the maker community for the last year or two. So it’s really getting more and more resources for them and that’s all i have if anybody’s got any questions, i’d be glad to answer them.
I’M sorry! Oh, if you mounted it to a wheel, it should be fine. Um, it’s pretty lightweight. I think you could mount all this in the to the hub and then wire out to the wheel. If you don’t have this, there’s not much to all of this and there’s other batteries available, which are much smaller, there’s some plastic versions.
I chose the aluminum house version just for durability, but there’s some smaller, like lipstick case size ones. That would work great for that sort of thing. You could shrink all this by about half and once again it’s nice because most of the parts are pretty inexpensive. I mean at most this is like 30 dollars worth of stuff.
If it, if it came undone in your wheel, you could live with it. Anything else. Thank you. .