Bicycle Light
BLuE!

Not being seen at night while on a bike isn't cool. I used to be an invisible freak pitch black at night. Anyways I bought my own set of bike lights. 2x 3 LED bike lights + attachment gear.

I bout a white and a red one. White for the fron and Red for the back (obviously). My lovely GT Arrowhead was now ready for the night life!! :p. The cost? $20 each.. ouch
 
Again, because I had such a huge haul of LEDs from Brightsparks I still had like 6 Blue ones left. So I used 3 of them to make a bike light. Now the properties of a bike light is so you are seen while riding on a bike.

Effective ways to be seen are to have the lights flashing!! *WHAM...WHAM** into the motorists eyes.
You could have a steady beam of light if you wanted too.


A picture showing the original light attached to the clip

There are two parts to this projecht:
#1. Making the circuit
#2. Attaching it onto the circuit

Part #2 is the harder part.

To start, I opened up the CatEye bike lights and looked too see how they did it. No 555 Timer... just a small round chip of some sort. I think it is like their own semi-conductor. If I wanted to, I could have desoldered the lights off the original bike lights I bought and soldered the blue ones on. But no, that'd be too risky and I don't wanna stuff up the $20 bike lights... (i'm poor :p)

From school I got a shoddy verboard, wires, resistors, capacitors and one 555 timer. The rest (which isn't much) I got from Bright Sparks... and from DSE.
3x Ultra Bright Blue LEDs
1x 4Way switched battery box

Part #1. Making the Circuit
This is easy I just made a 555 timer circuit in astable mode and put it on the veroboard.

That switch at the top belongs to the battery box. When it is on, the lights flash, it flashes at about 3 times a second. 3 Hz.

YAY! It's finished... so I thought. My brother said that it's stupid because it only has 2 modes. Off and Flash. The orginal ones we bought had 3. Off, On, Flash.

So after this complaint, I decided to try and make it so that you could choose when you wanted it to be 'on'. After much probing around on the circuit, I found out that I can achieve max brightness with the LEDs if I connect a switch from Pin4 of the 555 to the ground to reset the thing.


The original bike light for $20


When the switch in the corner is cut, the LEDs flash. When it is closed, the LEDs will stay on.

---------//SOLDERING\\--------

It's soldered and now for Part #2. Attactching it onto the bike, as it wouldn't be a bike light if it weren't on the bike!
 

 

 


This is my bike - the orange one


This is the clip used for attaching the light to the bike.

Next I had to find a way to attach the battery box to the clip!! I had two options:



This is a piece of aluminium I found from school


This is a piece of aluminium off the back of the computer. Those plates work good (nice reflection eh?)

The piece of aluminium from school was weak. So weak that the weight of the 4 batteries made the light sag down. The piece on the right however was strong as! But the downside is that I had to cut it with a hack saw in order for it to fit in the clip (it was too wide).

Using a pair of pliers, I bent the Al and taped it onto the bike light.


This is the end product!
This picture shows all da wiring under the cover! - THE GUTS OF IT


This is the end product attached to the clip on the bike!

And there we go! A bike light for the price of about less than $5. At night its even brighter than the original light! Projecht Successful!!!

This concludes the projecht of:
Bicycle Light
BLuE!