[!Bling!] Wheel lighting

What rim and spoke lighting options are out there?

Post your favourites off the shelf and DIY solutions to show who's the baddest (e-)biker in town and to pick up girls at the ice cream parlour with your tricked out ride!

Off the shelf:

• Revolights
• Monkeylights

DIY options:

• LEDs in spoke holes
• LED tape in rim
• glow in the dark paint

Also, what is the best way to connect the lights on a rotating wheel to the main battery?

Post your favourites off the shelf and DIY solutions to show who's the baddest (e-)biker in town and to pick up girls at the ice cream parlour with your tricked out ride!
More like at the biker bar! :wink:


Also, what is the best way to connect the lights on a rotating wheel to the main battery?
I'd say the thinnest ptfe teflon you can find, because its slippery like the girls at the biker bar :wink:

El_Topo said:

Also, what is the best way to connect the lights on a rotating wheel to the main battery?

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It's called a slip ring. I once made one for carrying power from a front wheel solar array to the charge controller.

I don't know of any slip rings designed for bicycle wheels. Making one is easily a bigger project than everything else involved in wheel lighting. It's neither easy nor cheap.

Reelight is a bike light product that uses a wheel-mounted magnet to run a frame-mounted LED light without making physical contact. There's no reason you couldn't come up with something like that using a fixed magnet and revolving lights. Giving them enough persistence to light all the way around would require a capacitor and careful power budgeting.

Chalo said:

It's called a slip ring. I once made one for carrying power from a front wheel solar array to the charge controller.

I don't know of any slip rings designed for bicycle wheels. Making one is easily a bigger project than everything else involved in wheel lighting. It's neither easy nor cheap.

Reelight is a bike light product that uses a wheel-mounted magnet to run a frame-mounted LED light without making physical contact. There's no reason you couldn't come up with something like that using a fixed magnet and revolving lights. Giving them enough persistence to light all the way around would require a capacitor and careful power budgeting.

Click to expand...

Maybe this one could be adapted:



https://www.rawdesigncycles.com/Articles.asp?ID=252

RunForTheHills said:

Maybe this one could be adapted:

https://www.rawdesigncycles.com/Articles.asp?ID=252

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For $340, you can try it out.
https://www.rawdesigncycles.com/category-s/195.htm

I'm not going to spend that kind of money to look like a much dorkier dork than I already do.

Why not power them with an inductor? One one the fork around the axle, Non rotating. The other around the axle , almost touching the first coil. You could do it with off the shelf coils, tool.You would need a mount. something 3d printed would work, or just make it out of polymer clay.

I made a plan for something like this once, but found a different solution. I never built it.

Here's a pic and a link:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1459?gclid=CIuGkOuw3eICFZe6wAodRnoDmw

Chalo said:

For $340, you can try it out.
https://www.rawdesigncycles.com/category-s/195.htm

I'm not going to spend that kind of money to look like a much dorkier dork than I already do.

Click to expand...

I don't mind looking like a dork, but I am not really interested in wheel lights. It was just an academic exercise.

Drunkskunk said:

Why not power them with an inductor? One one the fork around the axle, Non rotating. The other around the axle , almost touching the first coil.

Click to expand...

Now that's clever.

The mount is one of those things that a lathe would be best at. No offense to CNC frosting bags.

How efficient would that kind of inductor be?

markz said:

How efficient would that kind of inductor be?

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40% at best. But LED lights don't need much power.

El_Topo said:

Post your favourites off the shelf

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https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=spokepov

Never used any of them, though.

Planned, but never made, for my old DayGLo Avenger, bits of Dayglo-painted stuff to clip to spokes, or just painted sections of the spokes themselves, that would make spiraling patterns in different colors when lit with UV. In daytime they'd show up fairly well, but not against the varying backdrops riding past.

But at night, using UVLEDs shining on the wheel from teh side (boom sticking out from the axle, or down from the bars, and rack, etc), they'd light up pretty well. And meant I wouldn't have to put any wires, power, etc., into the wheel itself.



Eventually I decided I didn't want to deal with wheel lights/etc, and just used LED strips/etc for downlighting to light up the area *around* the bike on teh street, whcih helped more than I had imagined in getting cars/etc to go around me instead of almost touching my handlebars.

Nowadays I also use LED strips as frame/etc marker strips, turn signals, brake and tail lights, etc. Works ok, especially at night, but I think in the daytime the hand-sized-area DOT type lights work better--they're what drivers expect to see.

Thanks for the topic to remind me about these. I was always impressed with the demo video of Monkey Lights, which use POV (persistence of vision) to make the whole wheel light up while spinning. I especially liked the programmability and would love to ride down the road at night with my wheels looking like PacMan, but the high price always turned me away. Now I see they're on Amazon along with other cheaper non-programmable POV wheel light options at prices that don't hurt too much. I'll report back here if I try something that works.

I did pick up some lights that mount on the tire valve thread that were really cheap and kinda-sorta worked ok. Those turned on/off with the centrifugal force of spinning, but had enough weight that I had to re-balance my tires with them mounted.

Thanks for the replies!

So this slip ring thing seems a bit too excessive but the induction looks like a feasible idea*. The LEDs in your rim or spokes shouldn't consume more then a few Watts (I am sure someone will prove me wrong though with his rotating bat signal that can be seen from the other side of a mountain...).

I like the POV idea, is it possible to do this with rim LED as in my first post? One could create a ring of light that has a gradient from on to the another colour in it (like light blue from 9-3 o' clock red from 3-9) - a bit like a Revolight.
The spoke lights do look great in action but having some PCB in the spokes would ruin the aesthetics a bit IMHO.


* I actually thought about induction too but forgot to put it my opening post...

This is crude and way too long for how simple the project is, but it shows how simple this can be. Maybe an electronics guy can suggest how to smooth out the impulses with a capacitor if you don't want flashing?

[youtube]mhSHA-5ebUc[/youtube]

also

[youtube]8Wgbic1F7-4[/youtube]

wturber said:

This is crude and way to long for how simple the project is, but it shows how simple this can be. Maybe an electronics guy can suggest how to smooth out the impulses with a capacitor if you don't want flashing?

Click to expand...

As long it doesn't require a flux capacitor because you need 1.21 Jiggawatts of power! :lol:

PS: Thanks for the post.