Collaborate Disseminate
[Maarten Tromp]’s replacement of his motorcycle’s tail light with LED equivalents is a great example of something that every hacker learns sooner or later: interfacing to and working around existing …read more Continue reading Putting LEDs in Motorcyle Tail Light Shows How Trivial Becomes Tough
It can be amusing sometimes, to read an incredulous reaction from outside our community to something that would be bread-and-butter in most hackerspaces. Take the sorry saga of the Cadillac XLR tail light, as reported by Jalopnik. This car was a more-expensive Corvette with a bit of lard around its …read more
Continue reading At Three Grand A Tail Light, There’s An Opportunity For A Hacker
Motorcycles are hard to see at the best of times, so riders are often concerned with making themselves as visible as possible at all times. [Josh] wanted to do this by creating a custom tail light for his Ducati 749.
The tail light is based around SMD LEDs, mounted in acrylic to diffuse the light. The construction is beautiful, using custom PCBs and carefully machined acrylic to match the lines of the bike.
As far as warning lights go, a brighter light will be more obvious in the day time, but could actually hinder visibility at night by blinding other …read more
Continue reading LED Tail Lights for Improved Motorcycle Visibility
Sometimes you use a Raspberry Pi when you really could have gotten by with an Arudino. Sometimes you use an Arduino when maybe an ATtiny45 would have been better. And sometimes, like [Bill]’s motorcycle tail light project, you use exactly the right tool for the job: a 555 timer.
One of the keys of motorcycle safety is visibility. People are often looking for other cars and often “miss” seeing motorcyclists for this reason. Headlight and tail light modulators (circuits that flash your lights continuously) are popular for this reason. Bill decided to roll out his own rather than buy a …read more
Continue reading Brake Light Blinker Does It with Three Fives