Nic Jones (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nicwrites) wrote,@ 2008-08-17 17:41:00 |
 |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Results
So, bikelight.
Man, I need a tripod
This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
The light happily works for at least an hour. I still have no real idea what the battery capacity is, so I can only guess how long it'll actually run for. I don't think I'd want to ride more than an hour at night, so it's not a problem.
It's astonishingly bright. I could see the flashing reflected off street signs 300m away. As I passed one little punk he muttered "Jeaz! Are you trying to blind people?"
To which I replied "Yes".
It throws an incredible amount of light and I'm much happier about riding at night now. I could obviously use a better way of securing it to the bike than electrical tape, but that's a problem that can be solved later. The charger seems to work quite well and it's now in a little box with a wall wart and a 3.5mm mono plug that sticks in the back.
Other stuff:
This, boys and girls, is what happens when your design changes half a dozen times as you're soldering the circuit together. What a mess. This circuit is the manual control patch for the stepper motors in the x-ray lab project I'm putting together. It controls four motors. There are two 556s, and a 74HC14. It sits in between the motor control / indexer boards and the drivers. It provides a pulse train for each motor such that if you press a button momentarily it gives a single step, and if you hold the button down it ramps up from about 70Hz to 300Hz.
The circuit should have been pretty simple, but it's taken me two weeks (in between other things) to get it going. Ungh. Still, it's done now and I just need to get the right pushbuttons ordered in.
So, bikelight.
Man, I need a tripod
This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
The light happily works for at least an hour. I still have no real idea what the battery capacity is, so I can only guess how long it'll actually run for. I don't think I'd want to ride more than an hour at night, so it's not a problem.
It's astonishingly bright. I could see the flashing reflected off street signs 300m away. As I passed one little punk he muttered "Jeaz! Are you trying to blind people?"
To which I replied "Yes".
It throws an incredible amount of light and I'm much happier about riding at night now. I could obviously use a better way of securing it to the bike than electrical tape, but that's a problem that can be solved later. The charger seems to work quite well and it's now in a little box with a wall wart and a 3.5mm mono plug that sticks in the back.
Other stuff:
This, boys and girls, is what happens when your design changes half a dozen times as you're soldering the circuit together. What a mess. This circuit is the manual control patch for the stepper motors in the x-ray lab project I'm putting together. It controls four motors. There are two 556s, and a 74HC14. It sits in between the motor control / indexer boards and the drivers. It provides a pulse train for each motor such that if you press a button momentarily it gives a single step, and if you hold the button down it ramps up from about 70Hz to 300Hz.
The circuit should have been pretty simple, but it's taken me two weeks (in between other things) to get it going. Ungh. Still, it's done now and I just need to get the right pushbuttons ordered in.