• Kick off!

    marcin • 12/21/2021 at 23:20 • 0 comments

    I regularly get shouted at for cycling at night without lights. The problem is - I have lights. Nice Kryptonite lights, with rechargeable Li-Ion batteries. I just don't charge them often enough.

    I don't charge them, because it's a pain to undo those stretchy silicone mounting brackets, carry lights up the stairs, undo fiddly USB port protection gaskets, plug in those micro-USB cables (and who has two microUSB charging stations lying around anyway?).  I know that the next morning I'll most likely forget to grab them, and will have to run back upstairs, in a rush.

    I want lights with a decent UX. They don't seem to exist.

    My requirements are:

    1) Easy, single handed, one second mounting and removal

    2) Wireless charging on a Qi pad

    3) Everything else that my currents lights do

    I like to use FRDPARRC tables to organise my hardware projects and figure out what I need to figure out, so I made one here. 

    Things I need to learn to make this work are:

    • LED selection + optics design
    • Embedding Qi charging into projects
    • LED driver ICs

    Things that I know how to do, but just need to think about are:

    • Mounting methods
    • Battery type/size/placement
    • Housing design

    So the plan is:

    1. Research LEDs, drivers, and Qi charging
    2. Build a quick'n'dirty works-like prototype
    3. Miniaturise it.
    4. Build a looks-like prototype
    5. Integrate
    6. Done.