Bicycle headlamp that flashes a message in Morse Code.
This project started when a cheap bicycle lamp broke. The old light used an actual lamp (not LEDs) and was pretty large. I decided to turn it into a flashing bike lamp, but instead of flashing a simple sequence it would flash a sentence of my choosing in Morse Code.
Here's the original lamp:
There was space inside the lamp body for a 4 AA battery holder and I was able to make the battery holder touch against the lamp's original switch to turn the lamp on and off.
The microcontroller used for the morse is a 5V Adafruit Trinket. It will accept the 6V from the batteries. The output of one GPIO pin is fed into a transistor (a 2N3904) which switches four high-brightness white LEDs on and off.
The transistor base is fed through a resistor from GPIO pin #1 and each of the four LEDs has a 220 ohm resistor in series to restrict the current flowing. A similar circuit can be found here.
The breadboarded transistor/LED circuit looks like this:
When put together the insides of the lamp consist of the following:
The breadboarded circuit was transferred to some strip board and all that's needed in addition are a few wires to connect things up. The code contains a fixed string; it is flashed repeatedly.
And here it is in action. It's a little hard to see the Morse Code because of the response of my digital camera to the very bright light.
