When moving to Saudi Arabia, it is important to bring hobbies. Some have video games. Others learn to dive or windsurf. Considering this fact when returning this most recent time, I bought a SpokePOV kit from the nice folks at adafruit industries.

Short story is it works by attaching these microcontroller-controlled strips of LEDs to the spokes of your bike tire. These then monitor the rate at which the wheels are moving (they sense a magnet places on the fork), and based on that, quickly turn on and off the various LEDs to form a pattern. If the wheel then spins fast enough, then your eyes perceive it as a static image. A long exposure does the same trick:

It took maybe 7 or 8 hours of soldering (it was a slow start initially), and worked right off the bat. That is something I was particularly pleased with, as in my chosen field, code very rarely works correctly the first time.

Unfortunately over the summer my soldering iron disappeared from my apartment, and so I went looking for a new one. Our local supermarket, Tamimi (the Saudi Safeway franchise) sells soldering irons, but does not sell solder. Finding suitable solder was the mission of three days of biking back and forth between campus and downtown Thuwal.