When you’re out riding your bike, a horn can be a useful warning device to other road users and pedestrians alike. It can also be a source of fun and amusement, or annoyance, depending on the sounds it makes and how you use it. For the ultimate flexibility, you might like this digital bicycle horn that offers customizable sounds, as developed by [gokux].
The build has attractive two-tone components, consisting of a button pad for playing four sounds, and a sound module with a 3 watt speaker and battery pack. A Seeed Studio XIAO SAMD21 is the heart of the operation, with the microcontroller paired with a DFPlayer Mini which handles sound duties. When one of the four buttons is pressed, the microcontroller loads the relevant sound off an SD card, and plays it out over the speaker. For power, the build uses a lithium rechargeable battery with a healthy 1200 mAh capacity, which can be readily recharged thanks to a TP4056 charger module with a USB-C port.
It’s a nifty little build, and we love the Metal Gear Solid sounds. Though, we do wonder just how audible that 3 watt speaker is. If it proves inadequate, you could always step up to a much larger driver paired with a hefty audio amp if you so desire.
Typo on the linko, get’s you a 404 ho ho ho… try this one instead.
https://www.instructables.com/Digital-Bicycle-Horn-With-Customizable-Sound/
Cute, but almost certainly too quiet, and more importantly, none of those sounds say “hey, there’s a bike here, please look out!” In fact, if a driver or pedestrian does hear them, they’re probably more likely to distract a driver than warn them of the bike.
Bells mean bikes, or potentially a hooter, though not too much like a car horn, or people will look for a car.
It’s important that you follow the conventions; I discovered this years ago when I added a couple of “driving lights” to my bike (they were a popular add on for boy racers back in the 90s…) and found that people assumed I was a motorbike rather than a pedal bike and would therefore move onto the bike track to get “out of the way”. Whilst they were brighter than most bike lights of the time, I think it was the size and positioning which confused people.
“Bells mean bikes, or potentially a hooter”
A bell can let me know if there are hooters nearby?
Yes it’s a known stimulus: ring bell, salivate at expecting hooters to appear
“When you’re out riding your bike, a horn can be a useful warning device to other road users and pedestrians alike.”
Thanks chatGPT for pointing that out to the highly practical and generally well-educated HaD readership!
I have been pondering about something like this for a long time, but where I live and bike it needs to be waterproof and then the speaker gets kind of clunky and would get extra attention by potential thief’s when parked like the rotocope LEDs I once had on a wheel.
But the sound I would use would be a sample of screaming v-brake brakes. That is the one thing that makes pedestrians move out of the way. A normal bike bell (that I use today) hardly makes them notice me. If it where not for the bad performance and unpredictable behavior of worn out v-brakes, I would always have one on the back wheel to really let people know I am pedaling in their direction.
Hehehe, I guess it makes sense that screaming brakes is much more of an alert than a ding – phones etc ding all the time…
Why not just have both a V brake and the disc? As the V-brake is not intended for slowing you down can just mount it on a flip switch and recalibrate the cable tension as time passes so it keeps screaming at folks for you…
Hehe, hmm.. that could be done, but would be kind of crowded with a third brake lever up there.. :)
It is not for pedestrians to get out of your way. It is your responsibility to accommodate them.
Usually that could be true, but when they are 4-5 and covering the whole bike/sidewalk and holding hands it is hard for both bikes and pedestrians going the other way to pass safely. This could seem like a far fetched scenario, but happens from time to time close to my workplace.. Dinging the bell does hardly anything because people can not locate it and do not know I am behind them, and yelling makes people think you are angry – which is not the case.
It seems we all stop thinking about our surroundings when we are 3+ in a group and stop keeping to one side of a shared space to let others pass. Must be a heard thing..
Somewhere ages ago I saw/heard about a bike horn that used a water bottle shaped air tank that you could charge with the bike pump itself. The horn sounded like a semi truck. Pedestrians will definitely notice that.
Frankly at this point I’d rather cars and Peds do not notice or see me. They will continue walking or driving in a straight line. It’s remarkable the idiocy both of those groups will do to “help” like suddenly juke both ways or simply drive like 2 feet from your back wheel because they don’t want to scare you (?!) and just pass already.
My neighbor rides with such a horn. Excellent to scare tourists walking mindlessly on the bike lane, head buried in their phone !
Truck-horn volume would definitely help. When I need the horn most is when drivers are on the phone and they can look right at me and prove they never saw me, or that their judgment is severely impaired and they think I’m going 8mph like they would on a bike instead of three times that fast, and they think they have time to turn across my path. My “horn” is a loud, fractional-second “Hey!” I’ve made myself heard through rolled-up windows and awakened the drivers who then came to a screeching halt when they realized the foolish thing they were about to do. I’ve ridden bike over 100,000 miles and could write a book on riding safely in traffic.
Oh, and I forgot to add something about pedestrians jogging along the two-lane road or on the class-1 paved bike trail we use a lot which has almost nothing to slow down for for the entire 37 miles. It takes a lot of volume to be heard sometimes, because they have their music going in their earbuds so loud that I’ve heard it as much as 40 feet away from them.
If you are under the influence of alcohol, you are automatically at fault, even if the other driver went through red light to hit you. We need something similar for earbuds/headphones. If you had those in/on your ears, you are deemed to be operating the vehicle irresponsible and the accident is your fault. And the “vehicle” might be your car, bike, or even your legs. There’s no excuse for shutting out the warning sounds and causing an accident.
A guy I know has an actual truck-horn mounted to his cruiser bike. Totally not legal and blows out your eardrums in a radius of 10 meters but still one of his safer bike-mods ‘xD
Probably the Airzound (https://www.airzound.co.uk/). A colleague has one, it’s painfully loud, no excuse for ‘I didn’t hear you’ after firing that!
I have an electric horn that makes the Emergency Broadcast Tone. It is an h-bike I.e. human powered. A bigger source of annoyance is uneducated ebike riders, who treat them as unlicensed electric motorcycles. Sharing the path and courtesy are unknown concepts to them. The bike path hills in cooperation with us h-bikers like to take them down a peg.
Horrid when you get 40 km/h e-bikes blasting down tiny footpaths too