A better bike rear light for the dark winters in Finland
You might be wondering that why on earth someone would use their valuable time to build a bike light from scratch. Honestly, I don't know either. No but really this project started when I was trying to find a decent rear light for my bike, because it's now illegal not to have one in Finland. (Well it has been since this years summer, but now it's getting dark so...) But back to the story. I was looking for a decent looking rechargeable bike light. The only thing I found from the nearest shop was a really dum looking, battery powered and with a rubber band kind of body to mount it around your seatpost. And if you would know me better, you would know that I absolutely hate when people design things to be battery powered. So this is why I decided on trying to make a better one by myself.
The biggest problem tough in the current lights for me was probably the expandability. I think that one beefy battery would be better for powering both the front- and rear lights, and therefore it would be much easier to charge a separate battery rather than having to remove the rear light and front light and having to use two separate chargers to get the same job done. Another idea I had on this was using sensors that E-bikes have and make the lights a bit more clever so that they would know when you are braking, and preferably lit up when you are cycling and turn off when you stop using the bike.
One other thing that I thought is having indicators on a bike. The light that I made consists of 7 pcs of programmable RGB-leds, so I can drive any kind of animations on it. I'm not sure though if that's any useful to have, but it could be pretty nice if you decide to make your bicycle to a really powerful E-bike.
Here's a short demo of the prototype of the light:
If you are interested in this project or want to share your opinion about it / give feedback, I'll put a couple of Instagram posts down below that you can comment on!
Update: 29.10.2020
I got the control electronics to a pretty small package, but I'd really want to get it to even smaller size!
