Creating, tinkering, and making new things.
With the ProtoShield wired up and the ribbon cable prepared, the next step for the Speed Vest was attaching the electroluminescent wires to individual strands of the cable. This was rather fun as it was my first chance to try something I’d been interested in for a while, heat-shrink wrapping. I paid my Coolight, my…
If you’ve ever worked around computers, you have seen IDC ribbon cables before. They are extremely common. So when I saw that the SpeedVest required a 14-wire ribbon cable with a 2×7 female header, I figured that I could simply get one at RadioShack or order it online. Turns out, it is not so simple…
The electronic circuitry for the Speed Vest is fairly simple. A high-voltage, low ampere power supply lights up strands of electroluminescent (EL) wire. Each wire corresponds to a digit on either the left or right side of the vest. We use a microcontroller, the Arduino Duemilanove, to read input from the wired wheel sensor, calculate…
When I got volume 19 of MAKE magazine I saw a project that I immediately wanted to build. Called the Speed Vest, it is a cycling vest that shows your speed in glowing neon as you pedal. I like to bike and I wanted to start an electronics project, what could be better? Here is…