Lighting up...

One of the biggest problems for scootsters, bicyclists, and motorcyclists (shall I add pedestrians to the scenario?), is visibility. How do we increase our visibility in reasonable ways, and how can we do so without breaking the bank?

Well, I found a neat little do-dad through the forums at MajestyUSA that helps accomplish both goals. It's called, A windlight, and you can find it for sale at New Enough. The company that makes it is HJC, and it's really quite cool. It's a plastic housing which holds a tiny turbine and 8 LED's. The housing attaches to a helmet with some adhesive tape. Once enough air flows through the turbine, it starts to spin, which lights up the LED's. The LED's don't just stay lit, they pulse, which is much more eye catching than a steady light.


Let's look at the Pro's and con's of the device. We'll start with the positives.

Positive Aspects:

• No batteries
• Uses wind energy, which should satisfy most eco-freaks
• Innexpensive (it cost me $15.00 once the shipping and handling was figured in)
• LED's flicker, which will catch the eye of following motorists
• Lightweight, does not add significantly to the weight of the helmet
• Comes in two colors.

Negative Aspects:

• Plastic seems cheap.
• Unit is slightly bulky
• Unit somewhat resembles the camera emplacements on skydiving helmets
• Unit does not light up until the rider reaches 25 mph* which means it is not like other helmet lights that work in conjunction with the brake lights of the vehicle.
  

The skinny:

All in all, this is a great product. It's less expensive than other helmet lights, yet practical in its own way. The other helmet lights I've seen have a transmitter that connects to the brakelight, which means they activate when you hit your brakes. That's cool, but they cost between $50 - $100, which is not so cool. And, the upside to the Windlight is, it lights up at speed, rather than when stopping, which means, it helps with visibility while moving.

The cheap plastic construction is concerning, and it will be interesting to see how well it holds up to bugs and such that might fly into the turbine. A grill over the turbine might have been a good idea, but it would have changed the airflow, which might have changed the speed of turbine rotation, reducing the energy output, and increasing the spead one would have to travel in order to activate the LEDs.

If you can afford to, combining a helmet brake light, and a windlight would be a good idea, since you'd have a light while at speed, and another one while stopping, once you drop below 25 mph*. If you can't afford to do that, I think a Windlight combined with reflective clothing is probably the best option.

Now all I need is a headlight modulator...

*The product advertisement says it activates at 25mph, though in m testing, I found that it started to work at 20mph, though not as brightly as at speeds above 25mph