This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Standard bike lights were too boring for Arizona-based software engineer Jason Cram, so he decided to use an LED rope to make an eye-catching alternative. "It was a combination of wanting a Tron-style bike and needing to be more visible at night," he says.
You'll need
Strip the lights
Rope lights are designed to run from the mains, so you'll need to rewire them in parallel to work with a battery pack. "Cut the outer sheath of the rope down the middle with the razor blade," Cram says. "Inside there's a clear plastic inner wire which contains the positive, negative and middle wires." Running along this wire are about 35 LEDs wired in series. Pull out this wire, remove all of the LEDs and put them to one side.
Wire it up
Run the inner wire halfway around your wheel's inner, cut to size and repeat three more times. "Strip away the plastic from the inner wire every 50mm, then rewire the LEDs closer together," Cram says. "Make sure the positive end of the LED joins to the positive wire and the negative joins to the negative. I used a battery to check which end of the LED was positive and a clip to keep track of which of the wires was the positive."
Finish up
Solder a resistor to the end of the positive wire, then attach the red wire from your battery pack to it, and the black wire to the negative wire. Use the glue to insulate the wires, and fix the pack to the rope with wire ties. Put the outer tube back around the inner, cut to size, and reseal with glue. Use a rubber band to fix the battery packs on either side of the wheel to balance them out. Weave the rope lengths around the spokes. Now ride!
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
