Easy, Secure, Beautiful. Machined from solid aluminum, the Blink/Steady bike light turns on automatically and shuts off when youre not riding. There’s no need to remove it when you lock up because it’s secured by your seatpost. Our elegant, low-profile design is the bike light youve been waiting for – please help us make one for you!
On and off – on its own. The Blink / Steady bike light uses an accelerometer that knows when youre moving, and a light sensor that knows when its dark enough to turn on. After you lock up your bike, it turns off after 30 seconds. No buttons, youll never have to think about your bike light again.
Blinking or Steady. No more clicking through blink patterns because Blink / Steady has two dead simple, but equally effective options. Blink / Steady operates in Blink Mode if installed one way; flip it over and it works in Steady Mode, holding a bright, but evenly distributed light. Using its accelerometer, it knows which way is down.
The project is by Ben Cohen, Mark Sibenac and Stuart Heys. I love the milled aluminum body of the light (and really, who can get enough milling video pr0n), but theres not as much info included about their hardware. I got ahold of Stuart via email to discuss the hardware design:
In the beginning we used an Arduino to do the breadboard tests with our sensors since it was so easy to get things up and running.
Since then weve made 2 revisions of the PCB to optimize the performance and layout. We had the prototype boards made in Colorado and Mark did the assembly himself with a hot air station. We chose components based on their power draw and of course price.
We chose an Atmel ATtiny chip for the final PCB based on its ultra-low power consumption during operation and sleep. The ATtiny chip was available in a 4mm x 4mm surface mount package at a low cost. We are writing C code that is optimized to reduce power consumption.
Stuart also included some photos of the beta boards (photos by Mark Sibenac). Thank you!
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