That post belongs squarely in the bike porn thread. Post pictures!

How does a bike has speaker and 1000 LEDs? Could be considered a porn. I agree.

Tomo, you are right about this project being complex and a serious engineering undertaking. I did not mean to sound arrogant and am sorry if anyone was offended by my comment.

That said, one of the last real engineering projects I worked on was to design a lynchpin structural system for a medium-lift capability launch vehicle through which systems from 3 different departments in the company I was working for were routed. More specifically, I designed the payload attachment fitting for a launch vehicle equivalent in size and complexity to a Boeing Delta 2 rocket. The system I was responsible for integrated the fairing, payload, and second stage of the vehicle and required the routing of propulsion and avionics lines through it all while complying with structural design criteria and being lightweight enough to put on the rocket. To make the task more difficult, I also had to deal with thermal expansion and contraction issues (since this sat right above the liquid oxygen tank) and various other pressing design constraints. Oh yeah, I also had to deal with all the political stuff anyone deals with when working on an interdisciplinary team. Oh, and I was also responsible for making vendors and the guys in the shop get their jobs done as far as my project went.

Compared to that, this project is child's play. I may not have the specific knowledge right now to complete this, but I am learning lots every day as I read through AVR freaks and the like. This sort of thing is fun and laid back for me whereas the above job pushed me on a daily basis to my technical and psychological limits. If you are curious, I will tell you more about it, but I think you'll understand I can't say anything too specific, such as who I was working for.

Hey, thanks again for the assistance. Speaking of which, I don't have pictures but I do have video. Is it possible to upload video onto this site?

Geez, that's uber, man. Only thing I did ever minutely related is the bottle rocket in high school time long ago. I launched indoors and made a hole through the roof of the school. ... That was the end of my aerospace career.

P.S. Don't tell that to anyone, OK? I never told anyone I did that and never paid for the roof. Geez it must been two decades ago. Sweet memory for me. Heehee. You can see my immaturity hasn't improved one bit.

I know how that feels. Yeah, it was really tough. Work's tough and they expect us to go through career building and also send in technical papers at the same time. (and sometimes train your subordinates for some people; not me.) But unlike me, you obviously have accomplished considerably and shouldn't feel insecure. I envy you actually. Hope you do well with your interviews.

i read this whole thread and still don't understand why you need 5 spoked wheels. If its an aesthetic thing why not just dress up some much stronger and lighter (and cheaper) 32 spoke wheels with tin foil like that scraper bikes video... sound like an interesting project... good luck

Now that sounded arrogant.

Actually, four-spoked wheels are probably going to work better now. I'm probably only going to have one LED strip per side of wheel with two at the max to limit system complexity. With anything but an even number of spokes and two LED strips per side of wheel, the aesthetics will be adversely affected...though I do kind of like that one-spoked wheel.

As for dressing up a 32-spoked wheel, I want this thing to look futuristic. Regular spokes, while more structurally efficient, just have too classic a design. If you guys are interested in the inspiration for this project, the following link should give you an idea of what images and sounds come into my mind when I think about what I want to accomplish with this bike:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMX0X...eature=related

It will, of course, be done in the spirit of daft punk and not a direct ripoff.

Another good reason, if you look at the link I included in my last post, would be to keep the theme of abundant equilateral triangles going in the wheels, too. I know, I know, they are pizza slices, not triangles, but they are closest to equilateral triangles (only six-spoked wheels would be closer). If you look at my link, maybe this will make sense.

You ought to fix one up and show it off. Hehe A lot of pressure on you now with you being a rocket scientist and all. But then it has got to look better than the scraper bikes.

I welcome the challenge, and I will definitely show it off when I'm done. I'm working on it feverishly. I just don't have anywhere close to the circuit design or programming skills right now, so my work is currently consisting of studying. I'm working on the wheel(s) first, so I will post video when that's done which will probably still be more than a month.

I'm actually looking for a 100-pin microcontroller right now that is programmed in C. Large programmable memory would be good, too, and abundant peripherals. Unfortunately I'm just going to have to write code for a software-based PWM, but this should be minor compared to all the other code I'll have to write. Anyone have any recommendations?