Today’s post features my Hokey Spokes.  Hokey Spokes are lights, actually rows of LED lights.  They are computer controlled LED lights.  Each Hokey Spoke or blade has a row of about 20 LEDs.  The blades are clamped onto the spokes of a bicycle wheel.  As the wheel turns, human persistence of vision allows the blinking, flashing LEDs to form patterns.  They come in different colors, but I only have red ones.

The spokes are connected to each other through an infrared LAN.  This keeps them in sync with each other, so that they flash in time with each other.  It also means that once you turn one of the blades on, it turns on all of the other blades on a wheel.  Pretty neat.  In addition to a constantly changing sequence of patterns, Hokey Spokes can be programed to display writing. 

They come with their name, Hokey Spokes, programmed into them.  I once programmed in “Happy Halloween”, but I don’t know if that is still programmed in them.  They support a Palm Pilot programming interface, that gives you the ability to beam in any messages, but I don’t have one of those devices.  So I have to follow the manual procedure, which requires you to program messages using only two buttons.  And you thought texting was hard.

I was a little disappointed with the resulting movie.  I only had put on two of my three blades last night.  The manufactuer’s website uses up to six at one time.  Consequently, in order to get nice patterns or words that you can read, you have to be going faster then I was going.  I guess that I’ll just have to recycle this idea and do it right next time.  I got 1 mile in.  😉