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This digital SP tachometer for bikes uses 2 reed switches to urge the speed data of the bicycle. The reed switches are put in close to the rim of the wheel where permanent magnets pass by. The permanent magnets are connected to the wheelspokes and activate the reed switches everytime they pass by it. The speed is digitally displayed. The tachometer circuit works in step with this principle; the pulses created by the reed contacts are counted inside an explicit time interval. The ensuing count is then displayed and represents the speed of the bike. 2 4026 ICs are used to count the pulses, decode the counter and management 2 7-segment LED show. RS flip-flops U3 and U4 perform as anti-bounce. The pulses arrive at the counter’s input through gate U7. The measuring amount is set by monostable multivibrator U5/U6 and might be adjusted through potentiometer P1 so the tacho are often calibrated. The circuit U1/U2 resets the counters. Electronic bicycle SP tachometer circuit diagram Since batte...

Description    On my mountain bike I always used to have one of those well-known flashing LED lights from the high street shop. These often gave me trouble with flat batteries and lights that fell off. As an electronics student I thought: “this can be done better”. First I bought another front wheel, one which has a dynamo already built in the hub. This supplied a nice sine wave of 30 Vpp (at no load). With this knowledge I designed a simple power supply. The transistors that are used are type BD911. These are a bit of an over-kill, but there were plenty of these at my school, so that is why I used them. Something a little smaller will also work. The power supply is connected to an astable multi-vibrator. This alternately drives the front light and the rear light. The frequency is determined by the RC time-constant of R3 and C3, and R2 and C4. This time can be calculated with the formula: t = R3×C3 = 20×103×10×10-6 = 0.2 s You can use a 22k (common value) for R2 and R3, that d...