Bicycle Bicycle

BikeBlink Part I

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.