The Speed Vest went for its maiden voyage today. The video below shows me riding it at night outside my house. If you can’t see the embedded video, here is the direct YouTube link. For the record, I can bike faster than 6 miles per hour, but we had to work around the limitations of…
With the electronics complete, there were only a few steps left to finish the Speed Vest. The digits had been sewn into a large piece of black denim cloth. It was now time to put this in a more attractive shape. After some consideration I decided to go with a trapezoid, as the original authors…
The original MAKE article on the Speed Vest was cavalier with respect to the packaging. The authors state that they simply threw the parts into a small soap box. They also mentioned that the electronics kept getting accidentally ripped out and had already needed to be redone three times. It seemed like some improvements were…
An important part of the Speed Vest project is shaping the electroluminescent wire into digits. The original creators provide a layout template, which has odd digits only on the right, and 0 through 6 on the left. I wanted to do all possible digits on the right, leaving me with only 1 and 2 on…
With the circuit board wired up, the ribbon cable in place, and the electroluminescent wire connected, the Speed Vest was ready for its first end to end test. I used the sample code supplied to have the Arduino run through each of the output pins, lighting up each strand of wire to make sure everything…
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…