BikeBlink Part III

Once I started to wire the bike light into my 3D Box I quickly learned that while I learned a lot my box was clunky and would have too many wires. That’s around the same time I learned about custom circuit boards.

The first thing I did was watch a few videos and download the free version of EAGLE. I had the advantage of working with this circuit for a while and pretty much having it memorized. Once In EAGLE I created the schematic and board layout. From there it came down to printing and making though my pull though components would work as expected.  I also used the Trinket EAGLE file found on GitHub.

I then ordered the boards from OSH Park which I highly recommend. Their website is easy to use and provides a board preview which really helped me make sure my screen printing was in order. The boards arrived and everything works as expected.

Now that I have a much more compact cleaner version of my board layout next up will be revisiting the enclosure. For the curious, I’ve released the boards as Open Source Hardware.

BikeBlink Part II

Now that I had working code I started thinking about waterproofing. I decided to order a waterproof cable and print a 3D Box. As this was my first time 3D Printing I had no idea what I was doing. I designed a box in AutoDesk 3D and headed to my local maker space to have it printed. Over all I’m pretty happy with how the box turned out. My original idea was to solder everything into the box. However, I learned this was not as easily done as I was hoping so I’ll be going another route in terms of enclosures.

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.