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- Hi, my name is Grace.
And this is Digi-Key's Another Geek Moment,
summer break addition.
Thanks to our friends at Nordeast Makers in Minneapolis
for letting us use their makers space for our projects.
Today I'd like to talk to you about my
circuit playground bike light tutorial
found on maker.io.
There's simple components in this,
as you can see there's only these three.
And I'll start with the circuit playground.
This is the main component of the design.
It is very inclusive.
It has a lot of different sensors on here that you can use.
It has microphone, accelerometer,
some capacitive touch,
and lots of other things you can tie into your design.
For my design I was making the bike light powered
by this switch, and then this lithium battery.
So I started by learning more about the neopixels,
as that's what I would use for my display.
This webpage, the circuit playground bike light,
offers a very in depth explanation
of how you can code the RGB color codes
or the hexadecimal numbering system.
So I used hexadecimal.
Pretty much just calls out what percentage of
red light you'd like,
what percentage of green and then what percentage of blue.
You're going to have to begin by downloading
the Arduino IDE from arduino.cc.
So, I'll begin talking you through the code of it.
(lively music)
Now you can begin uploading some of these sample codes
from the project page that I mentioned previously.
We will take this spinner, I believe it's called.
Once you have your code uploaded,
you can plug in the switch in the lithium battery
so that it can run without your computer.
You'll be able to attach it to your bike.
And at this point you should be able
to turn it on and have your code.
Now you can go ahead and attach it to your bike.
I'm just going to use some simple zip ties,
but if you're going to use it in different types
of weather you might want to have something more robust,
so your circuitry doesn't get ruined.
You will see that this color display
looks a lot like spring,
and that is intentional.
In this specific temperature range,
it should be showing your pinks
and your greens and your yellows.
With the bright yellow light,
because it is on a bike, and you do want to be safe.
So yeah, there's lots of codes offered on the webpage.
Simpler things that you can use as reference as I did.
With this application and my bike light,
those were very helpful,
they had flashers and spinners
and all different names for codes.
But moving forward, there's lots of different sensors
I could have tied into this project,
that I decided not to.
If you're interested in exploring that
and trying this project,
there are about 50 projects or more on maker.io.
And if you're unfamiliar with that,
that is Digi-Key's maker page.
It will help walk you through some different
ways you can take this circuit playground.
You can get this board for 20 dollars from Digi-Key,
and for all it offers, it'll give a novice like me
a perfect opportunity to learn Arduino's IDE
or just programming in general.
And it did just that.
I'm not done exploring with this.
There's five or more very useful sensors on here
and different capabilities,
that I would be very interested in tying
to something maybe larger than a bike light.
I could see using this
in my biomedical classes or applications.
Maybe you put this on your patient's leg,
and the accelerometer will blink
if they are moving too fast if their elderly,
or you know, a number of things.
But, yeah.
Now let's go enjoy our project.
So now let's go and ride bikes safe.
Let's go practice some more programming.
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Now let's go ride our bike around fabulous Minneapolis.
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If you haven't checked out Noah's skateboard video
on maker.io, please do.
Alright, let's ride.
- Alright, let's get to it.
Thanks for watching.
(lively music)