The ZIMBER
Updated 3/1/2025
Here's a nice little lighting system I made to take to Burning Man 2024. It was created for my
swing bike, which is an interesting type of custom bike modification which involves adding
an extra handlebar joint beneath the bike seat.
This allows the rider to ride with the two wheels
out of line, such as one on the street and one on the sidewalk.
The glowy lighting system looks like the bike is covered in blinking eyes!
The control board works in an interesting way, there are two buttons. One which controls the pattern of the LED lights, "rainbow", "blinking eyes" etc. and one button which adjusts a "modifier" number. This number does a different thing for each pattern. With the "rainbow" pattern it adjusts the speed for example, but for the "fire" pattern, it adjusts how sparse the fire is.
The effects status are displayed on a little LCD screen! I made this on a solderable breadboard. I used every single kilobyte of memory on this super cheap arduino nano!
Now that Burning Man is over for the year, I put the Zimber into our apartment's fake fireplace thing. Here's Kaan sitting in it during a party with the smoke machine running lol.
A photo of me printing out the eyes for the Zimber, made of transparent filament