new and improved bike lights

Just finished tonight making my ultimate in warfare bike light setup. Screw all this energy saving LED crap, if I want something as professional as that it’ll be when I’m back into XC mountainbike racing, and in which case I’ll buy something off the shelf that I can rely on. In this case however, I’m after something hardcore that I can attach floodlights to, and use as a weapon of mass warfare on the road against cars (or even just when it’s really dark and I’m really scared of the dark).

I’ve put a few teaser pics here to get you interested.

Massive spotlight action
‘Massive spotlight action’

Essentially I have a lightweight 6V NiCad pack for my helmet mounted twin-halogen system, and a 12V 18Ah SLA for the handlebar-mounted twin-halogen system.

The helmet has the functionality of having low beam in a wide strip, or high beam with the same strip for the ground ahead, and a spotlight for the road ahead, which is adjusted to light the road ahead when I’m on my drop-down bars. So when I’m riding without hands and sitting up, the spotlight goes into the air and the beam goes into the distance – presumably if I’m riding without hands it’s obviously bright enough anyway ;)

Helmet mounted setup
‘Helmet mounted setup’

Not that it will ever NOT be bright enough, for the handle-bar mounted jobs. These suckers are a 10W and 50W halogen BEASTS. The 10W has the option of being on medium beam, at around nearly 10W, or on the low beam (and exactly how low is completely adjustable up to the full 10W with a screw). Then, if you flick the second switch, the 50W flood-light turns on. No matter what mode the 10W globe is in, the 50W automatically switches off the 10W. The 50W job must be used with caution, since my dodgy plastic mounting stuff probably won’t handle the heat too well – must be moving with this succer!

The globes and the switches
‘The globes and the switches’

stupid computers continued

Followed on from my last post the connector I got made the colour work like magic, although due to not having the software anymore for the card, I had to record the video and the audio seperately, and then put them together after using Windows Movie Maker (which was REALLY REALLY annoying, and it kept crashing very frequently). So it’s all under control now, but I still think that the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 multimedia card is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

stupid computers

Last night I connected our VCR to my computer with my analog multimedia PCI card, and the video came through black and white. Since our VCR is really old, chews up various tapes, and doesn’t record anymore, I thought it was the VCR’s fault. I borrowed our neighbours spare VCR, plugged that up and was extremely scared when I couldn’t remove the already in there VHS tape. After ten minutes of freaking out thinking I broke it, I discovered this was their ‘spare’ because it was broken.

I then borrowed their working VCR, and discover I still had the black and white problem. This means it is my computers fault. Not having used this PCI card for over a year and having installed a myriad of windows updates, and all that crap I thought I best update the drivers for the card. This means massive downloading, multiple reboots, yadda yadda yadda. Worth doing, since the software looks to be a lot nicer this year. Unfortunately, this did not fix my problem of black and white issues.

Eventually after poking around on the net for half an hour I discovered the connector plug I was using has some extra transistor or some crap like that put in it to make it black and white, and that there is actually two connectors that came with the card, and I seem to have lost the other one. I’m really hoping I did loose the other one, because then it means all I have to do is buy another one which I have, and tonight I shall test it out.