Here’s a rough video about the journey, creating my bicycle brake lights, powered by pedaling:

Since presenting my progress on Wednesday, I received the geared-motors and wheels in the mail and they are awesome! Continue reading →

So after speaking with Alex I had changed my project to be a pedal-powered Arduino. The idea was exciting. It would still be a pedal-powered brake light but through a microcontroller. I did some research on what that would entail and I didn’t find much. I would need to regulate the power and also make sure it doesn’t go above 5v and fry the Arduino. Alex suggested I contact Jeff Feddersen. He teaches Sustainable Energy at ITP which is the class that Alex’s project was for. Apparently in class he demonstrated a hand-cranked Arduino.

So I emailed Jeff, but I haven’t gotten a response. In the meantime, I found these images from his class that might be what I need.
http://itp.nyu.edu/sustainability/energy/images/class3/5V.jpg
http://itp.nyu.edu/sustainability/energy/images/class3/5Vschem.jpg

So.. Back to my Original Idea

But in the interest of time–this final is due in nearly a week–I decided to go back to the drawing board, do less drawing on the board, and just try stuff.

Again, these are the 3 things I need to accomplish:

1. I need to activate the light when I brake (create a switch)
2. I need to generate power from the motion of the bike, by pedaling
3. The product itself must be unobtrusive to the experience of pedaling and braking

Continue reading →

Talking to Alex, from the recyclelight.me project, was immensely helpful. We brainstormed ideas on how to generate power and activate a switch on the brakes. He was encouraging, but also felt that power generation wasn’t necessary for the project and asked me to think about using batteries instead.

I’d rather not, but doing both switching on the light and generating powere were going to be more difficult than I thought.  So my new idea is to constantly generate power from the pedaling motion of the bike, and use that power  to power an Arduino to which I can hook up sensors, switches and lights. It’ll be a smart bike.

I’m using this tutorial as a basis for creating the generator:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Bike-Dynamo/?ALLSTEPS

I will need to figure out how to regulate the power for the arduino.

There are three things I need to accomplish with this project.

1. I need to generate power from the motion of the bike, by pedaling
2. I need to activate the light when I brake
3. The product itself must be unobtrusive to the experience of pedaling and braking

The previous ITP project does these three things really nicely. By attaching the motors to the brake mechanism itself, they only generate power when the lights are needed, ie while braking.

My original thoughts on this was for the activation to happen via the motion of pulling on the brake. I got inspired by a hand flashlight I had lying around the apartment that didn’t use any batteries. I decided to dissect it for ideas and information.

Continue reading →

I always wondered why our bike lights weren’t powered by the cycling of a bicycle itself. In addition to that, I’ve always wanted my back light to turn on as I braked. This is the challenge that I’ve set up for myself for my Physical Computing final. Continue reading →