[posted on BROL] but I figure it might be of interest here too ..
As most of you know I've got a fetish for lights .. thats at least how its been described by the local members of our bike club .. Especially since I've hacked up a bunch of old light shells and stuffed them full of 5W cree LED clusters. I've built up a little reputation for having an overly bright set of lights .. I believe one BROL poster called them potentially [sic] "brighter than the sun" Unfortunately its not all nerdisms. I've got to work for a living and this time of year I'm doing at least 30-40 miles after the sun goes down .. So visibility is always something I'm thinking of .. both my own to see the tank-traps ^H^H^H^H^H^H potholes we have here but also visibility of myself to other drivers. Even though I'm driving what amounts to be a carbon fiber refrigerator it never felt visible enough with the basic lighting .. so I've made a few changes ..
For the shell though its been a bit of an evolution I started out with some simple cheap RGB lights from amazon (also the same thing you can get at SuperBright LEDS and a few other places) Those were kind of cool, but a little primitive .. I built a little control system using some LED controllers and a DMX system but it still lacked something ..
So after doing a lot of research I decided i'd do something with the WS2811 "Neopixels" and now I have lights .. and lights .. I didn't save much energy here as I more than tripled the LED count .. and Yegods is it bright if I want it to be .. Its also fun. I've had a grand old time designing patterns for it. WS2811 strips are basically single RGB LEDs with a small serial driver next to each one (the later versions have the driver embedded in the LED itself) you can get them 30/60 and 144 LEDs per meter I got mine here. it takes about 6m to fully wrap a mango and do something on the back to add a cluster .. so I built this with 2 4 meter strips and just chopped off the 20 LEDs or on each one to even them out. Fully lit, each strip (on white) will pull about 2A @ 5V so while you could use it as area lighting, I wouldn't recommend it.
I'm using an Arduno Mega micro controller, serial GPS, OLED screen (to show the state of things) a little RF remote to control things by hand (I also have another one on the steering tiller) and a bunch of IR LED/Phototransister pairs to read the "state" of the mango by tapping into the lights .. From that I can see "on" "left" "right" and "stop" I also tied one into the horn too, so when hit the horn that can trigger a full on "strobe" effect from the lights.
There is a whole series of patterns I built (you can see them in the video) some just twinkle, but as i evolve this the coolest one (in my opinion of course) is the little flare pattern. They basically crawl at the speed of the bike (as per the GPS) go slow they slow down, go fast they speed up .. you can thumb though the colors with the tiller control but I usually leave them on red .. they are quite visible and very bright.
Here's images of the build
http://imgur.com/a/dVgSL Here's a video walk through
https://youtu.be/TAPfyhu9R4E I've got to spend time documenting a few things for the build but I'll post the source code and the entire build out on github when I'm happy with it. I did find an 8 channel ANT+ serial board but I've not put it together yet. Eventually I hope to read the speed, cadence, HR into the system and do various things with lights based on those inputs well .. Right now though, I just calculate the speed from the GPS.
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Mango shell lighting (Read 5481 times)
