Oof. Red lights on the front are illegal because those go on the back. Blue lights are illegal on any vehicle that isn’t police. Green lights I believe are also illegal.
There are things that are formally illegal that we can argue merits of. But red light on the front is just a no go from any sensible perspective :-(
Note - I have a heavily nodded Soobie that's a lot of fun - I'm not at all claiming we shouldn't enjoy tinkering with our toys. But I also made myself familiar with Ontario highway act to ensure anything I do is safe and legal.
Agreed. It’s the same as with all those low profile turn signals that are basically on top of each other. There is a reason most jurisdictions require something like at least 12” between the turn signals to make it easier to tell which one is on.
In his first paragraph he says he wants to improve the visibility of his forward blinkers, so I feel this critique is undue. Like another poster said, I’m sure his only intention is to use them in an amber hue. Many LEDs on the market happen to support RGB – it’s okay to have a little fun with the available features in development.
True. But since the author didn’t discuss these nuances and people reading this might be tempted to make the same mod, it’s prudent to bring up this point lest someone else isn’t aware of them. From experience in these discussions on e.g. /r/motorcycles people who do these mods are unaware of these issues until someone points them out in about 3 out of every four posts and the 1 our of 4 will often state that they don’t care because they can outrun the cops on a 1000cc sport bike anyways.
That depends on which cop is evaluating you. Once a ticket is issued, great deference is given to the officer's judgement. Ask anyone with a heavily modified vehicle: rules are often secondary to the officers personal opinion.
Personally, I got stopped more than once, ticketed once, for my bone-stock exhaust on my vfr2000. All I ever did was give it a good polish.
If he's only running amber or white, there's nothing illegal going on. There isn't even a reason for them to be pulled over.
It's also possible your exhaust is illegal in your jurisdiction, many places have decibel @ distance requirements for exhaust and vehicle noise, which your exhaust may outside of even if it's stock.
That seems unlikely, given the bike (stock VFR exhaust are very modest, quite suitable for touring, your suggestion is ignorant and frankly insulting to the poster).
Many places the rules specifically state that OEM exhausts are legal regardless of how they test. I've always presumed that's the case because Ducati and Lamborghini owners are sufficiently cashed up to ensure legislation is written to accommodate them.
For the record, the cop who gave me the ticket never heard my bike. He was wondering through a group of our parked bikes looking for illegal mods. My polished muffler looked cleaner than the rest of the bike and so he thought it was a new addition. And the vfr 2000 was a very quiet bike.
> That seems unlikely, given the bike (stock VFR exhaust are very modest, quite suitable for touring, your suggestion is ignorant and frankly insulting to the poster)
Forgive me for know knowing the exact noise levels of a specific motorcycle exhaust /s
Even if you're within explicit noise limits, many states also have laws about 'disturbing the peace' that you can be ticketed for regardless of actual noise, in particular when done intentionally such as revving while in neutral/clutched.
> Many places the rules specifically state that OEM exhausts are legal regardless of how they test.
Some, but not all. In Wisconsin, the only thing that matters is that it's "not louder than stock". In Florida, you cannot exceed a specific decibel rating at a specific distance regardless of stock dbA [0].
> I've always presumed that's the case because Ducati and Lamborghini owners are sufficiently cashed up to ensure legislation is written to accommodate them.
Maybe in some states. Many explicitly exclude motorcycles from exhaust noise limits as well.
This is my understanding as well. Still bears pointing out. I know that my bike’s exhaust exceeds my state’s decibel rating, but not by an amount that I would worry about. I have ridden by and with others whose exhaust you feel in your chest more than you hear. I imagine if you do get pulled over for that specifically it would not be a fun conversation.
Oh yeah of course. But I have rarely seen these mods done and not used on the road. Most times people who make them either aren’t aware of their local laws or don’t consider what it looks like when you have e.g. red blinking red lights on the front of their vehicle.
I remember a year ago I got in a lyft and the driver talked about the little light they had given him. Apparently the first color it was set to got him pulled over by a rather confrontational officer.
I don't know anyone who has a dedicated track bike with headlights, lol. No track bike will be re-sold as a road bike, especially not something as serious as a CBR 1000RR. Once they're set up for the track with no headlights/indicators/brake lights, race exhaust, rear seat/pegs/brackets removed, number plate holders and various other brackets removed, slicks fitted, fairings painted etc etc they're too far gone to b re-sold for the road. No to mention most guys with dedicated track bikes are pouring thousands into them, not penny pinching on $35 headlight blanking panels.
Didn't say he wouldn't drive it on public roads. Only said the selection of light color is only limited for public roads. He could set it to one color for driving and another color for shows and meets.
If you want to ride on the street you get the 500, 600 or 650. The 1000 is a dedicated track weapon and riding more than 30 minutes to an hour on the street with result in posterior and back pain (the seat is designed for full tuck/lean off, not the upright position you often use in traffic).
Remember that it’s about fast as a six figure sports car, so $17k for a track only vehicle is a bargain.
That's _you_ and people like specifically, not "you" as in "everybody". The 500 and 650 are totally different styles of bike, and the 600RR is no less track focussed and ergonomically compromised than the 1000RR.
Lots of people ride "dedicated track weapons" on the street. The ergonomics are focussed, sure. But so are high heels - and nobody claims they are "dedicated runway footwear", people choose to wear them in spite of or even because of the challenge in wearing them - because the results are rewarding for those people.
I don't wear high heels, but I've owned an R1, and yeah it's uncomfortable. I also own a "dedicated track weapon" 125cc two stroke (a Cagiva Mito), and I ride it in traffic all the time because it's fun. Stupidly fun - big shit eating grin type stupidly fun commuting 15 mins thru city traffic to get to work type fun. And I do dumb shit like 1,200+km trips on it as well, in spite of owning much more sensible "touring bikes" (a Ducati Monster and a Honda VFR800), because for _me_ - sometimes the advantages of having my stupid little race bike for the twisty bits of road on the way is _totally_ worth the pain of riding it on the "boring bits of road" in between. And I'm not saying this as a flexible-bodied speed freak teenager - I'm 53, somewhat overweight, and need to preload on anti inflammatories to get through a full 10-12 hour day ride on a "full tuck" sports bike. But I do, and for _me_ it's worth it.
That $17k buys you a 2.8 second 0-60 time, and a sub 10 second 1/4 mile time - assuming you are capable of riding those (I'll totally admit it's way more capable a bike than I am a rider). It's astonishingly fast, and a bargain for a street legal toy. It's a good half second faster over the 1/4 mile than the fastest time for a stock Tesla or Lamborghini. Any half reliable sub 10 second street car has probably spent more than $17k in engine mods. A talented rider can run 9.8second quarters all night without voiding the warranty on a CBR1000RR...
I put 40k miles on a CBR 600 in the early 2000s. I lived in NYC at the time, and I rode most weekends and took annual trips to Florida, and rode it all the way to the Pacific once.
I sold it when I moved to an island in Alaska with few roads, but if I had stayed in the lower 48 I would have moved up to a 900 or 1000. I was very happy to learn on a 600, but eventually I kept wishing for more power at lower rpms.
Yeah, swapping mufflers is totally the same level of effort as using a smartphone app to configure the light colors. So clearly this guy totally intends to cause mayhem on the streets.
I have, actually, which is why I already knew it's that long, which is still an order of magnitude faster than changing the color of some lights in an app.
Based on site guidelines asking people to assume good intentions in others. Based on believing individuals should have the liberty to do what they want, as long as they aren't harming someone. Based on thinking people should be free to post their projects without having some internet rando come in, looking for an opportunity to prove how wrong they are.
* "Assume good intentions" - fair enough :). I'll agree with that noble posture.
* "Free to post without randos commenting" - mmhm... if you don't want internet randos to comment, don't post it to internet randos. To a certain degree, the whole point of posting it to the intertubes rather than emailing it to close friends & family, is to reach internet randos :-/
* "Based on believing individuals should have the liberty to do what they want, as long as they aren't harming someone" - I fully agree in principle, but I also 100% believe that red forward lights are in fact "harming someone". As I pointed in a sibling comment, I don't believe that's a rule that's there for funzies. "Principle of least astonishment" is crucial in driving, and drivers have lifetime of reflexes based on "White lights are coming to me, red lights are moving away from me / braking".
Can you imagine being on a lonely country two lane road, and then some red lights are coming your way in the opposite lane? Etc etc... scenarios are not difficult to figure out.
It's also not difficult to figure out scenarios in which he would never use red lights on public roads, but might use them at private events, like shows.
Given the lack of evidence that OP is an idiot, I'm going with the assumption that he's not going to run forward running red lights in public. I'm going to assume the only reason the color is changeable is to show off for fun.
BTW, your paraphrasing of my comment on random commentators is a mischaracterization. I'm not talking about all random commentors. Just the ones who can't see past their noses far enough to know their criticism is not universal.
Because it can easily look like a green traffic light. You might not think it’s a problem because traffic lights are normally not that low but at night on a street with no streetlights and with a hill involved...
Its usage is geographically specific, but this article [1] is a decent starting place. Green is commonly used to indicate that a particular vehicle is the command post for an incident, e.g. for fire fighting.
This looks really cool, but I'm generally against non-standard flashy blinky lights on vehicles. They're distracting to other drivers, and may not be as easy to interpret as a standard turn signal. Light shows belong in your living room, not on the road.
There are arguments for and against the turn signal looking like this. Its got longer periods at low brightness and its more visually complicated, vs. potentially the motion is more indicative or the fact that the light doesn't have a long "off" period means you are less likely to miss that its on.
Motorcycles have lots of arguments for and against driving with your brights on (ie both headlights, which can look like a faraway car) or loud pipes (save lives vs. cost rights).
As always the #1 safety feature is the one holding onto the handlebars.
A few car models around here started having this style of indicator light a few years ago and I've noticed that they take a bit longer to process when you are at a busy intersection.
And it should be noted: on a car you do not have the problem of the lights being closer together, which seems to be the problem the OP was trying to solve.
I think these 'licking' lights are a fad that will pass. Some of the more recent Audis do an entire light show on starting up. This isn't about safety - more about show.
Yeah, I'm wondering what LEDs these are. Are these actually LEDs that are designed specifically for road-use, or are these just some generic LEDs that you'd stick in a PC?
If you look at the videos, or read the intro, the original blinker is flush with the sides and almost invisible when looking head on at the bike. That’s the problem he is solving, not pimping it up.
Personally I think a "forward blinker" would be useful, in the middle of a car/bike. Many times at a 4-way stop where all the cars arrive relatively simultaneously, if a car doesn't have any blinkers on, I have to guess if they intend to go straight forward, or have forgotten to signal -- or they start signaling after they begin to accelerate for some reason. If I had to guess, I'd say that up to 1 of 10 cars may fall into one of these categories. People at busy 4-way stops (incl. myself) tend to want to increase flow by a self-organized optimization of allowing more than one car in the intersection at a time if they don't interfere w/each other- such as two cars across from each other going straight or turning to opposite roads.
I think that's one of the unappreciated features of self-driving cars, is that they will always signal their intent, whether to other human drivers and cars via lights, or directly via data.
> People at busy 4-way stops (incl. myself) tend to want to increase flow by a self-organized optimization of allowing more than one car in the intersection at a time if they don't interfere w/each other- such as two cars across from each other going straight or turning to opposite roads.
The algorithm is pretty easy (but sadly, not universal) once the intersection becomes congested, you switch from whatever you were doing to opposite sides enter the intersection simultaneously, straight and right turns exit first, left turns turn after passing the opposite traffic; then the perpindicular direction has a turn. Easy peasy, unless you live where the convention is to maintain first arrival order per entry direction, even when congested.
When all cars are self-driving, it gets even better because the cars will exchange information with each other over short-range RF networks. Paxos-like intercar signalling of intent will be a huge safety boost.
But as long as self-driving cars share the road with human-driven cars, the automatic cars will still have to drive defensively, assuming every other vehicle is potentially a Byzantine adversary.
Having done basically this same project before (but just adding amber LED indicators, no MCU) I’m a bit confused over the use of the sensors vs a relay on the existing indicator wiring. Was it to save from splicing into the factory wiring? If so, as an alternate method, on mine I got some of the same connectors used on the factory indicator wiring to add an in-line split off to a relay that triggered my new indicators which were then powered directly off the battery. This made the entire system very simple and reversible.
I wanted to do mine animated like my car but I wasn’t sure how well MCUs hold up to the pretty extreme vibrations bike electronics get submitted to. Plus I’m lazy.
good idea to box up and waterproof electronics. a potting box and potting compound is a quick way to ensure that your electronics keep working, stuff tends to take a beating on a motorcycle as there usually isn't a spot that stays dry 100% of the time.
Hand signals are nasty enough to do on a normal bicycle, especially when the road condition is ... sub-par. But on an actual motorcycle? I'd never even dare to try and ride one with only a single hand on the steering and the other hand swinging around.
Easier on a motorcycle than a bicycle, I think. Motorcycles just have a lot more momentum, bigger tires, and are going to be jostled by non-uniform road surface less than bicycles, which are very lightweight and have tiny tires.
It really depends on the speed. When going slow, you need to control the motorcycle with your whole body and it'd be really hard to use your hands to signal - much easier on a bike.
Above 20-30 mph (32-48 km/h) it gets easier, because the bike balances on its own and you don't need to hold the handlebars at all (you should though, for emergency braking and saving yourself from potholes etc.).
Keep in mind that most motorcyclist don't support the bike with their feet unless they're standing still - it's a good practice to keep your feet on the pegs as much as you can. It's way better to tip over than to lose your foot to the chain.
TLDR: I'd pick using hand signals on a bicycle over using them on a motorcycle every time.
I’ll agree that turn signals are a safety system, but I wouldn’t describe it as a critical safety system. Out of the 1000 things that could go wrong while riding a motorcycle the turn signals not working wouldn’t rank in the top half as far as safety implications if improperly functioning.
I had an intermittent short in the indicator switch on a motorcycle. One day it suddenly started indicating left at an intersection when I was going straight. A car in the opposite direction was turning (their) left and almost hit me. According to the other driver my bike started indicating (my) left as I neared the intersection so it looked entirely intentional.
Fortunately we both had left ourselves safety margins and had eye contact so we didn't crash. But add youth, testosterone and aggressive driving and that could easily have been a really dangerous misunderstanding.
So uh...does it turn off the headlight on the side with the LED like a car does? Because otherwise when the headlights are on (which is required in many places on motorcycles at all times) you will not at all be able to see these.
Edit: to be clear I’m talking about the large projector units below the LED driving lights. Most motorcycles come from the factory without the ability to turn those main headlights off and many states mandate them. On my FZ1 the main headlights are some of the brightest and most powerful I have ever seen from the factory on any vehicle including cars, by putting the LED in the same housing you are putting this LED strip just three inches from an incredibly bright light source. The factory turn signals (that the Author removed) are normally located at least a foot from the mains, the new models put them on the rear view mirrors way out to the side.
The author did not remove the factory turn signals. His model is from 2007 and a quick google search shows they did not have turn signals behind the mirrors, only the flush-mounted and very invisible ones you can see on the lower sides in his video.
I'm not convinced this style of blinker is a good idea as they are considerably more demanding of attention to understand for other drivers. That might seem like a good thing, but it really isn't. In part because they use an unusual signalling patterm and in part because the cycle time for this pattern is too long in your case.
At the very least I think I would at least double the speed of the animation to lessen the amount of time people looking right at them. Also, these lights seem awfully bright. Especially at night, this might endanger other drivers in confusing situations. You may want to add some ambient light sensing so you can adapt the brightness to the ambient lighting conditions.
Think of attention as a budget. You have X amount of time to look at and understand things around you in traffic. The more time you allocate to one thing, the less time you will have for the dozens of other things you need to keep an eye on. A common mistake when driving is to spend too much of your attention budget on one thing. You really don't want other drivers to spend 2-3 seconds staring at your blinkers. Ideally they shouldn't need more than 500ms or so.
As a fellow motorcycle rider, what I would recommend would be to find traditional turn signals mounted on stalks further from the centerline of the motorcycle. Those are much more of an improvement since they communicate more clearly and are far less "remarkable" and attention-demanding. I know, this is boring, but in my view, a much safer option.
These are small LED strips with no reflection mechanisms. No where near as bright as the headlight, or even modern LED running lights that many cars have now.
I come from Norway and in general, it seems to me that the requirements for low beam are different in the US than in Europe. My impression is that the low beam is higher in the US. Which is really unpleasant when driving at night.
One of the first thing I've learned from my father and grand-father while they were driving is to lower the beams for oncoming vehicles, and give a little blink signal to notify incoming vehicle that hasn't lowered it. Like everyone seemed to be following this "standard" (Bulgaria, back in the 80s/90s).
Here (Los Angeles), even in well lit streets, or worse on the freeway, you may see someone with raised high-beams and just don't care. It's particulary bad, if you are in the right-most lane (freeway) that's for more than one passenger in the car.
