What lights are these? (Best I've seen)
 

I've been reading/researching about high quality and very bright strobe/flashing lights. I came across two 30 second videos of these lights; nothing seems to be as bright. The person who made the video says they're DIY LEDs, but doesn't give any other information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWJeA27G6G8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezwO_asv1Zw

Any information at all would be great (e.g. type of bulb, estimated wattage, similar lights, etc.)

Maybe bright, but very annoying lights :(

They look like this one. But wouldn't you want to see them in real life? It seems to me that a person could make any light look good online.

Thanks, I've seen those lights, but it seemed to me that the lights in the video were more powerful than 1 watt. At least with his camera it seemed like 2 watts per led to me. Yes I would prefer to see them in real life, but I might just find some general information and build my own set of 4 leds.

I'm looking at 10 watt, 12 volt leds right now (ebay) that I could wire in parallel, wonder if that would be too bright....

Yes I have to agree. Putting a camera ten feet away and taking a video...any strobe is going to look bright. Not that these aren't bright. I don't doubt that fact. I do like the fact that the strobe's "pattern" is very eye catching. These are probably designed for auto/motorycycle use and as such require at least 12 volts.

Also interesting in this discussion is the use of "white strobe" for rear use. More and more this concept is becoming more common place. The other day I saw a cyclist ( riding at night ) with two white strobes mounted on a rear rack. At first I thought it was someone riding on the wrong side of the road. When I got closer I saw that the opposite was true. You can say what you want about the legal aspect of this but one thing is clear; If you want the maximum output and maximum visibility, a white strobe is going to get you seen.

I own very good/bright red flashing lights for rear ( night )use but I've considered using a rear mounted high output white strobe for special day time use ( when riding on roads that have speed limits over 40 mph. ) Currently I run a custom Amber ( XP-E) drop-in torch ( on rear ) that has a very nice strobe-burst/pause mode. This I use for added day time visibility. It's quite bright but a white XM-L2 emitter lamp with a slow flash mode would be brighter and likely have more visible range.

The best and brightest strobe/flash bike specific lamp I own has a VERY bright slow flash mode. It is the Gloworm X2. The X2 actually has two flash modes. The one I use is included in the "Adventure Program" and is the alternate sub-mode ( press-hold to activate ). The X-2 has 4 pre-programed UI menus. I use the Adventure program for road use. When I use the flash mode I laughingly refer to it as my "Nuclear Flash Mode" ( one flash every 1.5 sec.) With duel XM-L U2's, the output is AWESOME.
It's so "attention getting" I'm considering using one on the rear for day use. If I do I have no doubt that even on the brightest days I would double my rear "see me" visibility. It's that BRIGHT!.

I just found a Nova Bull on ebay for $30 new (closeout of a retail store) but these look better. The Bull is a little large. It was the one to have a few years ago but I think the Bull is showing its age now.

I bought it after having three different incidents where people did dangerous things clearly because they didn't see me, even though I had a 50 lumen flasher running up front. I'm putting the Bull up there because it's a compromise. If I still get people pulling out to pass while heading for me, pulling out of intersections, etc with the Bull, I'll switch to a pair of 500 lumen lights set in "holy dammit what the hell is that" strobe mode. I can keep dialing it up until they see me.

Yes that's probably the case. I'm not sure where I'd find a compact 12 volt rechargeable battery that's not super expensive.

I agree.

The XM-L2 is very similar to the type of lamp I'm looking to get. Gloworm is too expensive for me but I don't doubt that your setup is extremely bright. Personally, I like the idea of blinding people better than not being seen (even though what I've read on this forum up until now has made it seem like some lights are too bright).

I don't even know what the Nova Bull is, I found an old archived thread on here from 06 mentioning it (everyone seemed super excited about it) but all the links were dead. Just thinking about it however, LED technology has improved greatly since then and is continuing to improve exponentially, so if it's at least 7 years old, it's probably outdated.

I just wish there was a really bright, high power led light out there - specifically a blinker for flashing/strobe/warning purposes - that was easily fitted on a bike or made for bikes.

I don't think LED technology is improving *exponentially* but it is definitely improving a lot (more on a linear path than exponential though). If it were exponential, if we had Wal-Mart blinkies one year and 1 watt LEDs the next year, within 5 years we would have aircraft landing lights and the year after that we'd have blinkies the power of the sun.

Point taken though. I got the Nova Bull because it was relatively cheap and I'd had my eye on them for years.

I would really like something with a 4 watt amber driver with a good flash mode. heck, there's no reason I can't make it myself, it's just a microcontroller. I'll have to pick up some drivers and start playing around.

I took a look at the Nova Bull on their website. Looks like a nice set-up. The only problem is that it would take some special mounting and wiring to get it to work, not to mention a special battery. Still, quite do-able.

DiNotte still sells amber light sets. Their brightest is a 800 lumen version. Supposedly it is using the XML3 light body but is using a quad amber LED set-up. Knowing DiNotte it should come with one of their standard 3-mode flashing menus. They used to offer the 400R in Amber as well although when I last checked I didn't see it on their website. That doesn't mean they don't still sell it though. You should still be able to buy these lamps separately although to do that you need to e-mail them to ask on availability and price. DiNotte is known for coming through on special orders...or they used to be known as such.

We should have a sub-forum called 'EL&G for the Paranoid'. I mean really, what's next? Wailing sirens?

Good grief.

Well, someone will have to explain to me what EL&G means but I'll assume it is an intended put-down.

I will of course have to disagree that it has nothing to do with paranoia. It is only common sense to want to be seen when riding down a road. With all the distractions that are available to motorist when operating a motor vehicle the chances of someone "not seeing" a cyclist are multiplied. Not to mention more vehicles are using the roads everyday. Add to that the fact that many roads are not as well maintained due to bad economic times.

The average passing vehicle is the equivalent of certain death IF one of the people driving those vehicles just happens to be distracted enough to NOT SEE the cyclist up ahead of them and then ends up T-boning them. If a cyclist gets hit by a passing car the chances of him/her escaping without injury are pretty slim. If they get hit by a passing truck they are lucky if they live.

Fifteen years ago I gave up riding on the road. I just considered the risk too great after seeing a lot of close calls ( and hearing more and more about cyclists who were killed while riding on the road ). I continued to ride mountain bikes ( off road ) during those years but I missed riding on the road. I have a feeling I wasn't the only one to quit cycling on the road. During those years I began to noticed that I just didn't see as many road cyclist as I used to. That is still true to this day, at least where I live.

I now ride the road again. I do what I can to make my presence known and to alert the motorist I share the road with that there is "A cyclist" in front of them. A couple years ago I remember telling people that I felt safer at night ( on the road ) than during the day. That was because I had good lights ( front and rear ) that I knew could not be missed. If it works at night it can work during the day. You just need something that is Very Bright and eye catching. If it works for the police it will work for us.

For a day-time set-up to be successful it has to be able to draw attention from a good distance. My night time lights are visible at least a half mile away. I know this because people have told me this. When I get a REAR lamp that I KNOW is visible ( and DRAWS ATTENTION ) a quarter mile away in full sunlight I will be satisfied. The more I think about it the more I want it.

EL&G is the name of this forum.

Your statement that you know you have lights that "cannot be missed" makes exactly my point about why I think you light fanatics are fundamentally misguided: ever more light is not any kind of insurance at all.

Accidents don't happen primarily because drivers literally don't see bikes; they happen because though the critical information was detectable, the driver failed to attend/notice because his mental resources were focused elsewhere. Often times, a driver will claim that s/he did not "see" a plainly visible bike, pedestrian or car. This is entirely possible because much of the information processing occurs outside of awareness, and the driver was just not aware they saw the other person. Adding more and brighter lights does not change that; an extra watt does not mean you "cannot be missed." Emergency response vehicles get hit, even with sirens.

I put on brighter lights every time someone in a car does something dumb because they clearly didn't see me.

This one happened before I was running any front daylight flashers:
http://youtu.be/UOwv_IXZdIk

This one happened a while later after I'd put one of my taillights, a 44 lumen flasher, on my front forks (as you can see I also added rear video mostly in response to the previous incident, so I could get plate numbers).
http://youtu.be/-hiZgxpWNlQ

I'm now up to a Nova Bull on the front fork. If they still do stuff like this, I'm going to put both of my 400 lumen white headlights up there set on strobe.

The Bull that I have draws 0.36 amps at 12 volts, so that's 4.25 watts, the same as the most powerful current LED flashers that I've seen. Keep in mind that when the Bull came out, it sold for $125 as a bare fixture, so it was pretty cutting edge at the time. They hurt to look at even in the daytime, so it's unlikely that even if you could make a brighter strobe that it would be of much use, so the Bull is probably still not a bad choice, especially if you can get a good deal on one.

I've been looking on eBay and you can get amber CREE lights for dirt cheap there - $20 for two lights that each have a 5 watt amber CREE in front with a lens and 12 bright amber LEDs around the sides. This seems ideal if it can be mounted in a clear enclosure of some kind.

I rarely find flash modes that I think are ideal so I may get some of these and just make my own flasher, that's pretty trivial with a MOSFET and a microcontroller, it's an evening's work.

Well as you already know I disagree with your first statement. "Insurance" is only designed to protect. No form of protection is 100% guaranteed. One cannot protect themselves from every bad situation that could possible occur. That said my statement where I said, "cannot be missed" is to be taken as a "relative" statement. While I cannot insure that I am going to be seen 100% of the time I can "increase the possibility of being seen" thus increasing the possibility that I "WON'T be hit BECAUSE I WASN'T SEEN". The sooner that you become visible to motor traffic the greater your chances of "Not Being hit". This is the logic behind the thinking. If you disagree so be it.

About your last paragraph; I agree in part but there are always going to be reasons for accidents that have nothing to do with being seen. Sometimes crap just happens. I'll take my chances on the road if I think I can lessen the probability of being hit by using some bright lights ( coupled with other safe riding skills ).

I certainly understand the appeal of believing you're making yourself safer by deploying more and brighter (n+1) lights, however, every traffic accident study I've ever seen says that, far and away, the most common cause of accidents is distracted drivers, those not paying attention. An attention-getting light array only works to the extent that attention is given. Another big problem is that humans just aren't that good at determining the closing rate of an upcoming object, which in turn leads to incorrect responses.

Anyway, it might be that that obnoxious, super-bright flashing taillights decrease the likelihood of getting hit, but I think it would be hard to show supporting evidential data for that claim. It may just be that 'plainly visible' is a threshold we've already reached, and that going beyond it yields diminishing returns and does nothing to reduce accidents caused by inattentive drivers.

Yes, this is true. This is why the sooner you get someone's attention the better. Now to do that you need some real output if you want to do that during the day. Few people if they see something bright and flashing a quarter mile on the side of the road will disregard it and start doing something that would take their eyes off the road. This of course is not a universal truth as there are plenty of morons who take stupid chances AND are not concerned the least if something is going on up ahead of them on the side of the road. If someone is driving but not watching the road it won't take long before the vehicle starts to wonder. Everyone that drives knows this. Still people take chances, I see it all the time.

*Oh I think most people do very well at judging closing distance as long as their eyes are on the road. ( *assuming that they aren't otherwise physically impaired in some way ) If they didn't why would anyone want to drive a car? The real problem is bad driving habits; stuff like following someone too closely, impatience, driving too fast and of course taking your eyes off the road for too long. It is these things that lead to incorrect driver reactions which of course lead to accidents. People who do these things on a regular basis are the cyclist's worst enemy.

Some things are just common sense. Just look at all the vehicles that use high intensity lighting. Police, Fire Dept, Road crews, Utility trucks, school buses...yadda, yadda. These are organizations that are not only "On the road" and moving but sometimes. "On the road but STOPPED and out of the vehicle". They want people to see them and not hit them. If multiple levels of bright flashing lights weren't helping to some degree, "Why would the governments that finance their budgets continue to waste money on excessive lighting? Could they all be that wrong in assuming that brighter flashing lights actually help?

I agree with CatManDo. The reason for really bright, flashing lights is that WHEN you have distracted drivers, they're looking away from the road for maybe 5 seconds at a time. Add in maybe 4 seconds that they would need to brake, swerve, whatever to avoid an accident without causing another, and you're up to a travel distance of as much as 900 feet.

So you want a light that will GRAB the attention of someone who is just glancing at the road for 2 seconds every 5 seconds, from 900 feet away. This requires flashing and it requires lumens. A dim blinkie won't do it, and a bright steady light won't do it.

Blinking bright lights are somewhat annoying, but I don't buy that they're dangerous. Emergency vehicles have way more flashing lights and I don't recall seeing cars crashing into buildings when an ambulance drives by.

I'd be HAPPY to not have to bolt so much crap onto my bike - I really don't like it. But I'm going to keep upping the lighting every time someone does something dumb around me that indicates that they clearly didn't see me.

I certainly understand where you guys are coming from, and that it's important to feel like you're having positive impacts on your own safety, but I think you're misunderstanding key points, most fundamentally, that people can see and not understand/react/interpret correctly.

It's that situation that is, according to every key traffic study I've ever seen, the #1 cause of accidents. Yes, flashing lights are visible but only if someone is looking, and they only give alert drivers who have understanding of what they're looking at.

As I said before, it may be flashing lights help, and I'm not arguing they don't, but rather saying the degree to which they do is in serious question, and it's not at all clear that an endless race for brighter lights is delivering increased safety. It's entirely possible they're just more annoying and even actively dangerous. According to a FEMA study of emergency vehicle lighting prepared under its Emergency Vehicle Safety Initiative:

"Stronger lamps may be more effective in getting drivers to notice emergency vehicles, and thereby avoid many potential crashes. However, there may also be some negative effects of warning lamps—including visual effects such as glare and masking; and cognitive effects such as distraction, confusion, and disorientation. If greater strength also increases negative effects of warning lamps, then optimizing the design of warning lamps may involve determining the strength of lamps that yields the best tradeoff between conspicuity and those negative effects."

I think it's perfectly valid to ask questions like whether bike lighting obscures the fact it's a bicycle, which in turn can lead to driver uncertainty about response, unpredictable behaviors, and unstable traffic patterns. Are your lights so bright that drivers can't see your hand signals, for example. There is also some data to suggest that drivers are drawn into bright, emergency lighting, but let's not even get into that right now, because then we'd have to get into the discussion of poor judgement of closing rate, and we're already way into a discussion that properly belongs in S&A forum (Safety and Advocacy).

Amen to that. ;) The last thing I want to do is mount more crap onto my bike. This is why I keep searching for the most compact solution that has the most punch.

Today I had some spare time so was playing around with all the lamps I own. I was curious as to what lamps I own that could be easily moded with an amber lens that might beat out my current XP-E amber LED drop-in.

First up was a Bikeray III. At a distance of 25ft ( indoor test with amber lens ) the lux output measured the same as my drop-in ( ~ 24 lux ). The BR III has more total output ( and wider spread due to optic use ) but basically had the same distance lux throw as the lesser output reflector based drop-in. Lesson learned; reflectors have better distance throw. Since my goal is to attain more visual awareness from a distance "reflectors are the way to go".

For fun I slapped an amber lens on a MS 808E and turned it on strobe. Awesome output but so bright I could barely tell there was any color to the light. That being the case I decided to ditch the amber lens for a moment a do a basic "strobe test" with my Xeccon X-12. To those who don't know the X-12 is a single XM-L lamp with the best throwing reflector available for bike use ( that I know of ). At the same 30ft. distance, output on strobe (no lens) measured ~300 lux.

So there you go. The single emitter XM-L's can beat out the lesser output XP-E emitters hands down. No surprise there. Unfortunately there is no Amber version of the XM-L emitter that I'm aware of. You can do what DiNotte did and use multiple emitters but without a super reflector you don't get the same effect.

Right now I'm sitting at my computer desk and looking at the cheap Tri-Clone lamp I have. It uses three XM-L's with a tri-reflector. It would be interesting to see what would happen if I could find a way to mod the lamp with Amber XP-E2's :) Then again if I could do that I would be modding other lamps but I really don't have the resources or time to do those kind of things.

Even if I did have a dedicated Amber bike lamp I would still have to power the lamp. This means using more juice from the batteries I already carry or using bigger batteries. I hate carrying more heavier stuff. Choices, always choices.

Really interesting discussion here, probably one of the biggest current debates on here that I've seen (the issue, not this thread)... can't say that I've been around S&A much though. I'd have to think this over some more before contributing any of my two cents, or maybe I'll start a "do brighter lights make you safer?" thread in it's proper forum if there isn't already one.

While this is going on if any of you wouldn't mind posting some links to the Cree, Bull, or other lights it would be appreciated.

Nothing catches a driver's attention better than a Highway Patrol car's flashing red, and blue lights up ahead.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police recognizes that fully 25% of all state and provincial trooper deaths are due to being struck by a car while outside of their vehicle (usually on routine stops):

Officers being hit and killed while on the side of the roadperforming their duties is a problem. According to LEOKA data, an average of oneofficer a month was struck and killed for the 17‐year period between 1993 and 2009.Forty‐nine states now have move over laws that attempt to address this issue byrequiring motorists to change lanes or slow down when approaching an emergencyvehicle.13





Sure, they see 'em, but that doesn't mean they're not going to hit 'em.