Picture This.

You’re riding your bicycle at night, wearing a fluorescent vest so cars don’t flatten you on the road. You reach the end of a street but you realize there is a problem.

See, typically in a vehicle that doesn’t have a blinker to indicate where you will turn, the person riding is meant to use their hands to indicate which way they will turn.

But what about at night? You are on a bike with no blinker. Someone in a car far away may see your vest but they won’t have any indication that you are about to switch lanes or turn.

And so my Handy (not) Dandy Bike Light comes into play.

Re-Design

In my last project, I had a pun project called “Punch your Lights On.” This time, I took a similar mechanism, but gave it a more practical use. There is still a kind of jerking motion done in order to activate the lighting. This is due to the fact that on a bike, the movement would be rather deliberate and the light will not be turned on by a jump on the rough road.

 

Difficulties

The code is simply the “Blink” program that comes with the Arduino, but it is applied to the two different LED lights. This part was easy to execute.

Originally, the light was supposed to include a third LED which would constantly be on while a person is on the bike. This third position on the actual mechanism made the light harder to use and so I decided to remove it from the mechanism.

In my last project, the wires to the breadboard were to make contact with the metal marble. This caused some issues as the marble was not always in contact with the wires.

In this project, I expanded the possible surface area by connecting the wires to aluminum foil. These pieces of aluminum foil are meant to come into contact with the marble, making it much easier to complete the circuit.