LED Lighting project for bike

[pedroescobar]

Anyone have any good resources to learn about setting up individually addressable LED lighting strips for a bike. I’ve used the little El Wire strips in the past but I figure I wanted to take on a slightly more involved project this year. Are there any good online resources that can provide guidance to a beginner?

[BBadger]

You might look at the (costume) lighting tutorials on Adafruit's site and then experiment with mounting them to your bike or other things.

The only thing specific I'll say is that I like using those large USB power banks for powering LEDs on my bike because they last a while, provide the needed 5V that devices need, and come in a nice package.

[Token]

P, how “beginner” are you?

What kind of craft you got?

Ohms law? Miller currents? Do you code and can you handle microcontrollers like Arduino or maybe a Raspberry Pi?

Do you solder? Can you do SMD precision soldering?

Why do you need individually addressable LED? That raises complexity and craft floor.

If you have a vision of what you are trying to execute, information provided will be more useful.

[pedroescobar]

In the grand scheme of things I’m starting from “basic”. I have basic soldering and coding skills, but my neighbor can help out as he is definitely at the professional level for everything Involved. I’d just like to find some resources so I can pull together basic understanding of as much as I can before we kick off the project. I mean he could do the whole thing in a few hours, but that would go against the whole idea behind my project of learning something new.

Bigger project behind this is we will actually be running GPS tracking via a LoRA network for a handful of bikes. I’ve got 3 LoRA gateways. Two of them have confirmed camps with power and antenna access. I’m identifying a 3rd. Depending on how the initial build and testing go we will likely have the lighting on the bikes change as they get closer to each other and potentially send some different lighting programs throughout the week as well.

I get the programming on all of that will be much harder. I’m letting him handle that depending on how much I can bring to the table on basic build stuff. ie If I can pull together the basics of putting the lighting on the bikes and powering them myself, he can do all the radio, controller and coding work.

I’m looking at using 5050 LED lighting strips like the Alitove 5050 RGB strips on each bike.

ALITOVE WS2812B Individually Addressable LED Strip Light 5050 RGB 16.4ft 300 LED Pixel Flexible Lamp Tube Waterproof IP67 Black PCB DC 5V

[pedroescobar]

To update, in some other discussions I'm having, I'll probably look a bit lower on the LED density and have something in the range of 150 on the bike as the power requirements for the 300 strip listed would be too much.

[Traveller in Time]

So called "remote controlled addressable LED Driver" for a start ?

(me currently playing with WS2815)

[pedroescobar]

Yeah the more I'm reading, the more I think I'll go with 12v. I'm finding lots of sources online as well. I just figured I'd start here and Reddit.

[Token]

All right! Now we got some meat on this bone.

I’d recommend leaning on SparkFun Electronics. It’s a real good resource for the tutorials on how to run all the type of gear you would be using.

Here is an example of the LoRa tutorials.

https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results ... #tutorials

There is also good stuff in addressable LED topics, controllers and shields.

I’d also suggest going Arduino for the microcontrollers on the mobile components:

low power, reliable, intensely supported by a vibrant user community, lots of options from SparkFun, Adafruit, and other vendors for shields and boards...

[pedroescobar]

Token: I wanted to see your thoughts on using a 48v to 12v converter for LED power? In some of the conversations I’ve had a few people suggested that may be the most efficient way to power LEDs given this will be on on Ebike. My buddy suggested the power on the LoRA equipment will be low enough that we can leverage a battery for 10 days straight and the LED equipment could use the Ebike battery which will be charged daily since we have a power grid for our camp. This will remove the need for a larger separate 12v battery on the bike.

It seemed reasonable given I rarely ride 30+ miles at any given time in a day.

[Token]

A good DC to DC converter should be fine for that. Standard stuff on golf carts so cheap, easy, proven.

[junglesmacks]

Brah. So easy now.

Getcha yerself a waterproof WS2812 strip
Get a $10 IR controller
Get a USB to round pin power adapter cable
Get any USB based battery power bank.

Put it all together.. and bam. You've got yourself a ready made pixel strip that you can use to wrap bikes with, your testicles, you name it.