**This project is for all the cyclists who are really into safety, but also want to keep it stylish**
For this project, you will need:
- (1) 9 volt battery
- (5) 3 volt LEDs
- (1) 1 ohm resistor
- (1) 150 ohm resistor
- about 6 inches of 12 gauge copper wire
- (2) different colored 22 gauge copper wire (I used black and red)
- (1) battery connector
- electrical tape
- crazy glue
- small piece of cardboard
- small piece of foam
- wire cutters
- needle nose pliers
- wire stripper
- scissors
- a half moon shape of plastic (i cut mine out of an instant coffee container)
- soldering gun or iron and solder
- lots of duct tape
- (1) bike
The first step to being safe in style is to strip your 12 gauge with your wire strippers, then cut that piece of wire in half. Next, grab one end of the wire with your pliers and coil it, but leave at lease an inch of straight wire. When coiling it, make sure it is both flat and tight! Do the same for the next piece, but with this piece, bend the straight section upwards then parallel to the surface. Your two pieces should look something like this:
Next, you will solder two sections of red copper wire to the bent piece and the power end of the battery connector to the straight piece. BE SUPER CAREFUL! The soldering gun/iron gets very hot!!
After you’ve successfully soldered the wire (and not yourself) to the coils, you will crazy glue your little foam piece to the cardboard. Make sure to map out where you want your components to go! The foam piece will go underneath the raised section of the switch.. When choosing your cardboard, it does not need to be large, just big enough to hold the components of your switch. Tape the flat piece by the straight end to your cardboard and the piece with the raised end by the coil. When taping the raised piece, allow some room for movement, because this will be the part of the switch that connects your circuit. Your switch should look something like this:
(NOTE: These pictures only depict one red copper wire because I attached the second later)
For your next to-do, you will tape your switch to your seat. Make sure it is secure. Then, tape your plastic piece onto the seat so it covers your switch. When taping, make sure you only tape one side down to the seat, so that it can squish down when someone sits on it. It should look a little like this:
Now to the exciting lighting parts. We will create two daisy chains. One that consists of 3 LEDs and a 1 ohm resistor and another that consists of 2 LEDs and a 150 ohm resistor. Solder each so that the LEDs come BEFORE the resistors. The should both look something like this:
Now, solder one of the red copper wires that stems from the raised section of coiled wire to the positive leg of the first LED. Depending on the model of your bike, your positioning will be different, but if you are using a Schwinn Sting-Ray, it should look like this.
****Before I taped the LEDs on the metal bar, I wrapped tape around it so that the metal of the bike would not interfere with the metal of circuit.***
This is what it should loosely resemble:
Now we need to connect the end with the resistor to ground. To do this, take a section of your black copper wire and using a wire stripper, strip about half an inch of the insulation off. Then, take the exposed wire and the free leg of the resistor and twist them together.
At this point, you can either solder them together or use electrical tape to hold them in place. I chose the latter. After the wire and the resistor have been attached, you will now need to attach the black wire to the ground wire of the battery connector.
Strip the other end of the black copper wire another half inch. When stripping the ground wire, strip about a quarter of an inch, because you will be connecting the ground from the other daisy chain to this ground as well.
Repeat these steps with the other red copper wire, the other daisy chain, and another strip of black copper wire. When that has been completed, attach your battery connector to the battery and then tape the battery to the bottom of the seat. This is what mine looks like:
So there you have it! Both style and safety, all in one handsomely taped package!
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