Knight Rider Lights

Since just about the first week I owned my car, I’ve wanted to have some lights in the bumper. I wanted them to move like the Knight Rider’s lights moved, be white, and totally rock.

I don’t know why I never pursued the idea. I probably got discouraged by who knows what or may have thought about doing something extra crazy extra and then found out that you could get some cheap chinese shit that did the same thing; it doesn’t really matter. The fact is, despite not doing it before, I’ve done it now and it was worth the wait.

I don’t know how you’re “supposed” to come up with a project, but the way this was started was with me at mpja with Darius. I was flipping through their catalog and saw 5mm white LEDs on the cheap; I had to get some. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with 50, but then, we watched an episode of the new Knight Rider series and I had my epiphany - those LEDs were going on my car.

I went home and started plugging things into a breadboard. With a calculator in hand, I breadboarded a setup of LEDs that used a 12V supply and was controlled with a transistor. Once I proved to myself that my setup worked, I soldered together a few panels, grabbed one of my arduinos and through a series of trials, I had my prototype working. Using a few scraps of plastic and other junk I had laying around, I cobbled together a sort of enclosure for the entire thing and brought it out to my car. It looked awesome.

Since I had several Atmega8 AVRs in my parts bins, I figured that it was time to grow up and do this thing without the helping hands of the Arduino. Shortly thereafter I had myself another prototype - It was time to plan out the full scale version.

As luck would have it, Darius just got an email from MPJA about their deals of the month. They had 10mm white LEDs that were half again as bright as the ones I was testing with and were about 30 cents apiece - I picked up 200 of them. I also got some boards and other various supporting hardware I’d need.