BikeBlink Part I
Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago 😱. The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.
About 10 months ago I had a friend who got hit by a car while on a bike. This lead to stepping up the visibility game. One of the improvements were bike spoke lights. They serve to increase side visibility while riding.
When I first saw this I was just getting into the maker space and said to myself, perhaps stupidly, “I can make that.” Then went to work.
I started researching and landed on the Adafruit Trinket as my microcontroller of choice. It’s small, powerful enough and has everything I needed to run my LEDs.
The Trinket has ~5.25K bytes of space available for use, and 512 bytes of ram. These limitations would be a good to work with as a challenge to write more efficient code.
After some time I got a working test which flashed though 4 different LED modes switching modes at a press of the button. As an added bonus I added the mode into E2PROM(non-volatile memory). This allows the device to turn on in the mode it was using when power was disconnected.
The code is up on GitHub.