arduino bike light - a (r)evolution

In this post I am going to present you the different bike light prototypes that I created over the past months.

It started with an old bike tool bag, an arduino clone, an led matrix, and a battery pack:

The light animations were pre-programmed onto the arduino and were shifted randomly.

As a next step, I was trying to bring more interactivity into the bike light. I wanted to be able to send the pixel data wirelessly to the led matrix. I came up with a quite bulky prototype:

I connected the arduino clone via I2C to an arduino that was equipped with an ethernet shield. The ethernet shield in turn was connected to a TP Link nano router. Everything could be powered by a simple battery pack. The router opened an ad-hoc network that could be joined by any wifi-capable device. I build a Java API and and Objective C API to be able to send the pixel data to the led matrix. Here you can see a snapshot of an iPhone app that sends the visualization of a frequency analysis to the led matrix:

Since the above prototype was a little bit clumsy, I came up with a smaller hardware design and a nice case that produced with a 3D printer:

The new hardware design is based on an arduino, a wifi shield, and a colors shield. The wifi shield opens an ad-hoc network that is used to send the pixel data to the colors shield.

Here are some impression from the case printing: