Rebuild the bike: Let the wheels turn on LED lights too

In order to improve the night ride safety of bicycle riders, the city can build bicycle lanes. But the most important thing is that people who drive must see them. A forceful mechanical engineer put forward a solution for power: to make bicycles and cars, there are front and rear lights.

Kent Frankovich is a mechanical engineer at Stanford University and the University of Texas. One day riding a bike from school, he suddenly wondered why his bicycle headlight was so far away from the ground that he could barely illuminate the road ahead of him and he couldn't get the driver to notice himself. So from last October, he and two helpers transformed the LED lights mounted on wheels.

Revolights punches the aluminum ring of the wheel and installs a row of LED lights. When the wheel rotates, the LED emits an arc of light, the white light in front illuminates the road in front of the bicycle, and the red light behind reminds the attention of passing vehicles. The position of the light is the position of the wheel, and the driver can easily determine the distance of the bicycle. This is difficult to achieve with existing bicycle lighting equipment.

Now that Revolight is powered by a lithium battery, Frankovich and others hope to develop a new version of the energy function that uses wheel rotation.