Xenon strobe running lights

You are taking the piss. Aren't you?

Sorry mate, didn't mean to cause confusion!

Piss:
Drinking; refers to a watery ale, beer or larger (especially American). Unless you google search and come up with some unsavioury 'life style' sites when drinking piss has a whole unexpected and positively filthy meaning. Nornally in UK. 'this is full of wind and piss' = American lager/beer.

Piss: Having a, the act of urination. Universal. See life style sites

Piss: taking the, often lost on Americans. Humour, a joke, not serious. As in 'I wanted to put high energy strobe lights on my bike. I figured this would, make me sick, set off epilectic kids, and generally make me an antisocial excuse'.


Sarcasm...well get used to it

Get real, you'll end up throwing up or having a law suit slapped on you for causing people to have fits.

They switch off the strobe lights on aircraft as they taxi on stand for this reason. Except for the red beacon which is there to tell the loaders when the engines are off.

excuse me are they serving canabis cigars after dinner over there with you guys tonite>? What's next 3,000 watt head lamps so you can see where you are going?

If you want to be more visible then there are kits somewhere around I've seen that keep the indicators on all the time steady...the indicators will still flash on the side selected when you want to indicate a direction change...

Another option for you?

Personally I have loud bikes...don't know if that assists but I like it anyway

I think the reality is that if they don't look it doesn't really matter what you do...

SR

Well......where to begin?

I whole heartedly agree that the "major" brands of American beer are thin, watery, and by and large tasteless. Fortunately, beer making is having a Renaissance here in the Pacific Northwest and there are many small "micro breweries" that produce a large variety of beers. I can't say I like them all, but they're all better than Coors or Budweiser! Personally, I enjoy thick, dark, full bodied beer - think Guinness Stout. My personal favorite is "Arrogant Bastard Ale" - check their website at www.arrogantbastard.com - these folks have a great sense of humor as well as a great beer; don't pass up an opportunity to try it.

Thanks to aero (see "acerbic") for helping expand my cultural vocabulary. I enjoy hearing the variety of slang from Australia and the UK. I'm sure if I were to find myself in a busy British pub on a Friday night I would only understand half of what I heard. Since this forum is my only link to other SR500 owners, I find myself using terms I've heard only here when I'm tinkering with my bike. Celebrate our differences as we say here.

Headlight modulators are readily available here. I have to agree they are visually annoying - but of course, that's the point! In an ocean of headlights yours will certainly stand out. The problem is they are ineffective for drivers behind or to the side of you. My cousin is recovering from back injuries suffered from being struck from behind while stopped at a traffic light - the driver of the car simply did not see him there on his bike.

As for the epileptic seizure concerns, flashing lights at specific frequencies can and do trigger seizures in certain individuals. Having had four seizures myself, I do know something of the subject. For me, flashing lights are not the trigger - I've had the strobe-EEG tests done each time. The point is that only specific frequencies trigger seizures and they are all much higher than 1 Hertz.
If 1 flash per second were a problem, then turn signals would be triggering seizures world wide. Police and emergency strobe frequencies also stay well away from the frequency bands that are known to trigger seizures.

The legal aspects would be problematic for sure. Every cop with a ticket book (canary? ) would have you pulled over. On the other hand, ask any cop how much he enjoyed surveying the aftermath of a car-motorcycle collision. There are precedents that would favor flashing running lights for motorcycles. Roadside construction equipment, slow moving vehicles, tow trucks, etc, are required to display flashing running lights to alert drivers to their presence.
Moving vehicles with flashing running lights are nothing new. The clincher for me though, is that you can easily buy exactly what I'm talking about here today - if you ride a BICYCLE - and it's perfectly legal. I've seen many bicyclists with these units and they are quite effective - that's where I got the idea. Also, there are a lot of LED arrays available for motorcycles that flash in various patterns that are legal. I just don't think they would be very effective in bright sunlight.

To me, the intensity level is the key. I'm not talking about the kind of strobe effect you might see in the disco with the stop-motion and all. Nor am I talking about camera flash intensities where you see after-images.
The system would have to have daylight and night time modes and would not be focused with reflectors or lenses - just a little repetitive blip to catch the eye. I'm sure such a system would prevent many motorcycle-car accidents.

I was hoping one of our more electro-tech savvy members might offer advice regarding the technical feasibility of this idea. For all I know, the battery and charging specifications of the SR500 might not be up to the task of powering four 35 watt lamps in one second bursts.

I think I'd be jumping on their trunk (or boot !
I was once riding on the freeway next to a woman in a big Cadillac - I was looking right at her face in profile - I could have reached out and touched her - and she just changed lanes and ran me off into the median.....ahrgg!

Let's say there are four 30 watt bulbs, so that's 120 watts total.
At 12 volts, that's 10 amps which seems like a lot.
But there is also a time factor involved - the lights flash once per second with a duration of .1 seconds. A one hour ride is 3600 seconds; during that time, the lights would have been on for just 360 seconds total. So that would be a 10 amp draw for 360 seconds out of 3600. Would that be .10 amp/hours?

Well I am Impressed to see the beer situation has improved over there!

Now lets get down to business. Your post says Xenon tubes. To run one of these things you need a charging and timing circuit as the tubes run on something like 10,000 volts. Not a problem as you can ramp up the voltage from 12 very very easily to run one of these. However it does mean those figures are off as you need to work out the consumption of the power supply, not the tube you are running. It won't be much either way.

The problem is any xenon tube, no matter how small creates a very short, sharp intense flash, you can almost feel the electricity in the air as the tube discharges. Very distracting and running it as a strobe can be positively dangerous on the road. As an illustration - say you had an accident at night in road works and were lucky enough to attend court to explain yourself, it a known defence to say that you had been confused by a strobing light, for exmple at night when going through roadworks the effect of cones in the road can make the headlamps of on coming traffic appear to 'strobe' and cause you to loose your concentration.

If you have ever worked in a noisy environment, with lots going on and where every vehice is fitted with an amber strobe beacon, for example working round an aircraft when it pulls up on stand, or on a construction site where everything that moves has a flashing light nailed to it, you will know exactly how disorientating and confusing all those flashing lights can be.

In fact the strobing type lights are now being used less and less in favour of the standard bulb with a rotating mirror, due to the number of people saying that accidents they had were caused by a loss of concentration due to harsh strobe warning lamps. Recently I tried to get one of our vans airside, but it was refused a permit due to the xenon warning beacons fitted to it. A bit extreme, but it does reflect the safety concerns here.

To look at the reson you want to fit a strobe from another angle; I used to know a traffic policeman, he said that despite being on a great big white motorcycle, wearing full reflective gear, head and running lights on and even on occasions with the blues and twos going he's had people to the same stupid lane switching stunts on him, all with the same 'sorry I didn't see you' story.

The real answer here lies in driver education. You could speed tape an entire disco complete with mirror ball on the front of your bike and some slack jawed moron will still fail to see you, or fail to look rather. In the UK as motorcycling has become more popular they have been running some hard hitting campaigns to educate car drivers. Personally I think you should spend a year on a motorbike before being allowed to drive a car, but they think TV adverts work better. I must admit I have seen more drivers looking for me and moving out of the way then ten years ago.

I don't want to get bogged down in specfic points and aruements, the thing is that putting a strobe on you bike opens you up to all sorts of other issues. If it were a good idea you'd see more people doing it. If you are really hell bent on doing this why don't you look into LED strobes? They use virually no power and are more vibration proof the a glass tube



Sorry if you didn't like the tone of my earilier posts, it just sounded like such a barmy idea I genuinely thought you were taking the piss.