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Motion switch for a rotating LED car wheel light?

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pretzelz

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Hi everyone. I'm a complete newbie in terms of electronics, but I do know roughly how to solder. Thats about my level of experience. However I'm very excited about the following idea which I need your help on. Should be a simple solution I expect:

I love LEDS. I decided to buy 4 small solar powered LED lights and attach one to each wheel of my car. Clever I thought, for a man who wants a spiral of white light on his wheels when going along at night - but which are charged through the day by the integrated solar panel. (unlike LED valve caps)

**broken link removed**

The items in question were these:

**broken link removed**

or search: solar LED keyring They cost about £1.

Picture attached.

My question now however is - I do not want to go around turning them all on (and off again) before taking a journey. So the idea came to me, how about installing a small motion detecting switch on each circuit, which turns them on automatically when the car starts moving. (And sure, off again when the car is stopped presumably)

I live in the UK and we have a shop called maplins which I found sells some possibilities for these switches.

Please see here: **broken link removed**

Having read the details of these switches, I'm asking for your expert opinion on their feasibility. The one thing that comes to my mind which might be an issue is: from what I've read, the switch activates when it is past a certain angle of tilt, and then deactivates when the angle is reset. If this were the case, it couldn't work on a car wheel since you're unlikely to park back in your drive with all wheels facing at 0 degrees angle.

Therefore, I ideally need is a switch that turns on when it detects motion, and off when it doesn't. No stipulations about an angle reset point. Would one of the switches on that website do?

They are listed as:
Plastic Tilt Switch with Right Angle Pins
Non Mercury Contacts Tilt Switch Module
Non-Mercury Tilt Switches
Miniature Tilt Switches

You might know of a better alternative.

Many thanks!
 
Solar charger, nice idea. I've been thinking of a POV display for car tires, but still working on a few details. I was considering centrifugal force to activate, the switch would be a small weight attached to a spring, maybe the guts of a ballpoint pen, since I would need a tube to enclose it. Basically, it would only turn on, while the car was in motion, and should turn off, regardless of orientation while stopped. The part I'm stuck on though, for POV, is that I need to detect rotation speed, and position, without using the car body. Maybe something IR and reflective. Been kind of on the shelf lately though, my new car doesn't have hubcaps, which was sort of important.
 
I'm thinking the way to do this is to use a spring that requires more than one G (earth gravity) to activate, and use centrifugal force to turn on. It would be blinky at low speeds unless you use it to charge a capacitor that will power the lights until the next revolution.
 
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