During review of Late Answers, I left a comment. The user responded by posting a new answer, saying that he couldn't reply to my comment until he had 50 rep.
I (perhaps mis-)understood that users could always leave comments on their own posts. Reading the Privileges page only confirms my (mis)in...
The vids are ok, but the photos I think will be disappointing. I've used my Nikon SLR to good effect at track cycling, but the phone just isn't up to it
@Mσᶎ no, actually I think it was quite "retro" in a few ways.... For a start, the food was very fried and unhealthy. But also there was no "memorabilia" on sale.....for example you'd think the organisers would knock out commemorative tees, jerseys etc. Seems incredible that they pass up the opportunity to market themselves.
Just the European culture I suppose. Not quite as mercenary as the Brits, nowhere near the merkins
is this too rude: "@Aron: I'm guessing from your comments you're suffering Dunning-Kruger effect"
In response to a claim that because he can find one thing on Alibaba for $5 and can't think of anything else you might need, therefore the total cost is $5.
On the "brake light" question.
I want to say "your comment displays so much ignorance that I can't think of a concise way to address any of it".
Summary: it's hard to make a light that reliably turns on only when the brakes are used. Most cyclists who want brake lights buy rear flashing lights because they're cheap and ubiquitous.
Ignoring cost, to work well a brake light on the back of a bike would need to be paired with a constantly o...
Hmm. "@Aron: Two 5W LEDS is $5.60 from that seller... you also need a case, battery, controller, waterproof microswitch plus cable harness" and leave it at that
I have actually played with the cheap "5W" LEDs and most of them have severe issues, either with light output, build quality or supply. Or all of those.
I suspect in valume manufacturing it would be cheaper to buy Cree parts direct just to avoid the overhead of hiring someone to manage the cheap LED supplier as their full time job plus the cost of extra inventory to cover the time when they fail to deliver or deliver unusable parts.
@Mσᶎ well that's the real rub. We all know that LEDs can be had got pennies, yet we all happily shell out for good lights, because on its own the led is nothing
@PeteH yes. I build my own helmet lights because I enjoy it and that way I get exactly what I want. Also, there aren't any helmets I've found with decent lights built in. The experience of doing that convinces me that it's worth paying someone else to do the work wherever I can :)
Probably takes me 10 hours to build a helmet light, plus ~$50 in parts... no way would I pay $500 for that light, it's barely worth $50.
@PeteH I was wondering whether you could underdrive the LED to get the constant light, then push it to full rated power when braking. But I prefer the positional shift of the brake light, I think.
@PeteH I've done that. I decided that the $100 or so it costs to have the shop put it together is recouped the first time something doesn't work. The phone call "the video card doesn't quite work, one that does is an extra $20"... translates to me having to return card #1 and hope that card #2 works, which is $100 worth of faffing all by itself.
@Mσᶎ but the former would make for a smaller profile. These car dashboard cams will automatically do things when they detect a collision - so presumably they have some sensors that can detect deceleration. I think that technology is still not mature, but maybe someone could put one of these sensors on a light one day
so braking is "inferred" rather than measured.
But I'm just thinking out loud here
It would be nice to be in a position where you can say....here's a chip that does X, let's tag it on to that other chip that does Y, and see what happens. But most of us wouldn't know where to start.
@PeteH there's a rear LED light with camera that went through kickstarter a while ago that does that, and the SeeSense one I have does similar stuff. I think it's a hard problem, mostly because bikes don't have suspension so 99% of the extreme accelleration events are "normal use" rather than braking or crashing.
A lot of the tiny embedded devices have accellerometers in them now because the solid state ones are so cheap and simple that it's worth throwing it in as a bonus with the chip. Partly because they need X much area just to fit the pinout on, and the actual processor part of the chip is small in comparison and they end up with "spare" silicon where the marginal cost of adding stuff is effectively zero.
This is amusing: bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/25798/… poor solution to an awful problem... the problem being 'all the cool kids are imitating professional riders, I will do the same'. But without the skills those riders get through huge amounts of practice. So they end up with horrid kludges like that brake lever.
Summary: it's hard to make a light that reliably turns on only when the brakes are used. Most cyclists who want brake lights buy rear flashing lights because they're cheap and ubiquitous.
Ignoring cost, to work well a brake light on the back of a bike would need to be paired with a constantly o...
