Tag Archives: Motorcycle

Super simple controller for Motorcycle LED lights

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For automobiles, especially motorcycles, auxiliary lighting that augments the headlights can be quite useful, particularly when you need to drive/ride through foggy conditions and poorly lit or unlit roads and dirt tracks. Most primary lighting on vehicles still relies on tungsten filament lamps which have very poor efficiency. The availability of cheap, high-efficiency LED modules helps add additional lighting to the vehicle without adding a lot of burden on the electrical supply. If you want to add brightness control, you need to either buy a dimmer module, or roll your own. [PatH] from WhiskeyTangoHotel choose the latter route, and built  …read more

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LED Tail Lights for Improved Motorcycle Visibility

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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

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A Digital Tacho For A Harley

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If you are a lover of motorcycling, you’ll probably fit into one or other of the distinct groups of riders. Maybe you’re a sportsbike lover always trying to get your knee down, a supermotard who gets their knee down without trying, a trailie rider for whom tarmac is an annoyance between real rides, or a classic bike enthusiast who spends more time in the workshop than riding.

[Xavier Morales] is none of these, for he cruises the roads of his native Catalonia on a Harley-Davidson Sportster. If you’re familiar with Harleys only from popular culture, or you’re a sportsbike rider …read more

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Brake Light Blinker Does It with Three Fives

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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

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Light Rider: A Lightweight 3D Printed Electric Motorcycle!

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It sounds like the name of a vehicle in some sci-fi tale, but that fiction is only a short leap from reality. Light Rider is, in fact, an electric motorcycle with a 3D printed frame that resembles an organic structure more than a machine.

Designed by the Airbus subsidiary [APWorks], the largely hollow frame was devised to minimize weight while maintaining its integrity and facilitating the integration of cables within the structure. The frame is printed by melting a sea aluminium alloy particles together into thousands of layers 30 microns thick. Overall, Light Rider’s frame weighs 30% less than similar …read more

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A Motorcycle Lift From A Trailer Jack

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If you have ever worked on a motorcycle on a regular basis with a limited workshop, you’ll know the challenge of taking off one or other of the wheels. You’ll probably have plenty of tales of bikes balanced precariously on blocks or suspended from the ceiling on a web of cargo straps, and if you are really unlucky you’ll have the Dented Tank Of Shame from the whole edifice tumbling down.

[Mike] has created a simple and elegant solution to raising his bike, a rather tasty unfaired Fireblade, after being unimpressed with commercial stands whose only aim seemed to be …read more

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Motorcycling Like It’s 1905 With A Home Made Engine

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The modern motorcycle represents the pinnacle of over a century of refinement in design and manufacture of its every component. A modest outlay will secure you a machine capable of three figure speeds with impeccable handling, breathtaking acceleration and stopping power, that somehow seems also to possess bulletproof reliability that will take it to a hundred thousand miles of faithful transport.

At the dawn of the internal combustion engine age it was a different matter. Machines were little more than bicycles with rudimentary engines attached, brakes and tyres were barely capable of doing the job demanded of them, and the …read more

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Fail Of The Week: How Not To Build Your Own Motorcycle

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There’s a saying among writers that goes something like “Everyone has a novel in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay”. Its source is the subject of some dispute, but it remains sage advice that wannabe authors should remember on dark and stormy nights.

It is possible that a similar saying could be constructed among hackers and makers: that every one of us has at least one motor vehicle within, held back only by the lack of available time, budget, and workshop space. And like the writers, within is probably where most of them should stay.

[TheFrostyman] …read more

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Self-Balancing One-Wheel Motorcycle Tears Up the Beach

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[XenonJohn] wrote in to let us know about updates and a recent test drive of an Electric Self-Balancing One-wheeled Motorcycle, fresh from the beach where he says it proved to be great fun to ride. The design and build have been updated since we last saw it as a semifinalist entry in the 2014 Hackaday Prize. The original, he says, “looked cool but was slow, cumbersome and really dangerous to ride.”

Since then it has been completely redesigned and now has a super fat kite-surfer wheel, a front crash skid with damper, and a variable geometry which allows it to …read more

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