We’ve got some new content from Erin St. Blaine!  Check it out:

This summer I’ve been working on converting my old mountain bike to a fabulous Festival Mutant Vehicle with lights, fun fur, and gorgeous paint colors.  (See Previous blog post).

This week, I’ve added a 6-foot tall fiber optic “tail” to the bike, with around 50 strands of fiber optics and light pipe, to make a very visible and lovely tail flag for the bike. I’m using a Feather M4 Express with a PropMaker Wing added, connected to a super bright 3W RGB LED.  The fiber optics are easily removable for transport, and they’re really bright and easy to see, even in the daytime.

The RGB LED uses Circuit Python to slowly shift through a rainbow of colors, lighting the fiber optics with a lovely, buttery smoothness. The whole assembly is really well protected from the elements — I even dropped the battery pack, LED and microcontroller into the pool to test it and it kept working even underwater!

Check out the latest installment of Erin’s tutorial on the Adafruit Learning system: https://learn.adafruit.com/playa-festival-bike/rear-fiber-optics

If you trick your bike out for a festival this season, be sure to come by Show and Tell on Wednesdays, and show off your fancy ride!