Originally Posted by
Seattle Forrest
Have you ever wondered the same thing about liability insurance?
Not sure what you mean by liability insurance. I have
third party property through Bicycle Queensland, is that what you're referring to?
Originally Posted by
J.C. Koto
I've seen your bike sir, and although I'm in awe of the ingenuity of the onboard electronics, you have to admit most people wouldn't be caught dead on it.
Probably a good thing, means my bike is safer from theft.
Originally Posted by
ItsJustMe
There have been hundreds of attempts to mount indicators on bikes.
Also, a lot of the people designing these are Portland hipsters who ride single speeds at 12 MPH around cities with 20 MPH traffic and think that a few 20mw LEDs on a backpack driven by an Arduino will work. They will not. The lights need to be of a similar brightness to car taillights or they will simply not get noticed. They need to be clearly visible from a car with full bright sunlight hitting either the LEDs or the windscreen of the car. This means you can't just glue an LED onto a stick - you need proper bright LED drivers, which means metal heat sinking and proper constant current drivers, and optics to point the light where it needs to be - at eye level. Anything else is wasted.
Also you'll want to have auto-off - push left or right, it sequences for maybe 10 or 15 seconds then goes back to the normal taillight operation.
I have two switches for the indicators that individually turn on the left or right indicators, they are separate from the tail light.
I agree the LEDs need to have substantial brightness. A bare LED is not going to cut it, it'll at the very least need a diffusing lens so it's not a single point of light. Hence why I bought off-the-shelf motorcycle indicators and in one case, replaced the incandescent bulbs with LEDs. The front indicators are 1W modules. On the rear, they're pairs of smaller LEDs (that's what would fit in the housing) but still substantial brightness, mounted about 500mm apart.
Originally Posted by
CliffordK
A simple thing would be to make sure that one's cycling coat has a good reflector strip along the length of the sleeve (front and back?) so when one outstretches the arm, it is actually visible at night.
That is a feature they often miss when designing these things, they often have a band of reflective tape around the arm, but not the stripe of tape down its length.