Did you miss the Indiegogo campaign? No worries! You can still order your Blinkers here!

Why Blinkers?

The future of mobility is autonomous driving and V2V communication. And in this age of technology, where are the advances that should be making bicycles safer?

Cyclists are the most vulnerable road users: two wheels to balance, no chassis to protect us and no devices to communicate with other vehicles.

As cyclists, we find ourselves in many risky situations while riding in the city: other vehicles don’t respect our space, or don’t understand our intentions, and we feel it’s unfair that cyclists are not seen as a natural part of the road.

We want to improve safety on bikes, by building the next generation of bike lights. It’s not about making them more powerful, but about adding a set of extra safety functionalities, including turning indicators, a brake light and a laser projection.

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About Blinkers

Blinkers is the one thing that was missing for cyclists to be safer and to be a natural part of the road. It packs everything you need to be seen, understood and respected by everyone else in the road.

More visible

It starts with the regular bike lights that you know: a front white light with 100 lumens power and a rear red light with 30 lumens power.

White headlamp

Red rear light
 

More predictable

Blinkers includes turning indicators that allow cars to always know when and a where you are turning.

Front turning indicators

Rear turning indicators
 

There is also an accelerometer that measures the motion of the cyclist and triggers the brake light when the cyclist is slowing down. In that way, you let vehicles behind you know when you are braking.

Rear brake light 

More respected

A laser semi-circle projected to the ground behind the bicycle makes you even more visible at night and helps other vehicles to understand what is your space in the road.

Laser projection
 

Easy to use

Blinkers are very easy to use. A remote control on the handlebar will allow you to control the turning indicators, switch on and off the laser projection and to switch between the different modes of light.

Remote control

Blinkers comes with a front and a rear mount that you fix onto your bike. Thanks to its magnetic attachment, you only have to plug them in when you hop on your bike, and out when you hop off. Also, Blinkers automatically turns on when you plug them in, so that you can start riding right away.

Automatic switch

You can also recharge the battery with a micro USB cable. On top of that, the battery level will be displayed into the optical screen for 2 seconds after you plug in your cable.

USB rechargeable

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Blinkers utility study: Is Blinkers making me safer?

“Is this really solving a problem?”, “Am I actually going to be safer when I ride my bike?”, “Isn’t this just giving the feeling that I am safer? The risk is still there!”, etc. Those are some of the questions and feedback that we have received from several cyclists since we started with Blinkers. These are fair and serious concerns, and we have taken them very seriously.

To be able answer those questions, at the beginning of 2017 we started working with the Human Factors Engineering Laboratory of ETH (Swiss Institute of Technology) Zürich that specializes in product development, driving simulation, experimental design, photometry, and behavioral sciences.

Together with the Human Factors Engineering lab, we have designed three types of experiments in which we will invite a certain number of participants in order to evaluate the utility of Blinkers:

• Visibility of direction indicators at various distances and under various traffic situations (daytime, night)
• Understandability of direction indicators and brake light: will car drivers notice and understand the light signals coming from Blinkers?
• Laser utility: will car drivers leave more space when overtaking a cyclist with Blinkers’ laser projection?

In mid-March this year, we provided a set of Blinkers for the tests and experiments mentioned above and in May 2017, the HFE lab will deliver a report on the results of the experiments and include conclusions on the utility of Blinkers in view of improved traffic safety.

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Technical specifications

Water resistant​​​

Is it raining outside? Snowing? No worries, you can still ride your bike with Blinkers. It is fully water resistant and complies with IP-64 standards of International Protecting Marking.

Battery

You don't want to charge your battery everyday? Every two days? Or even every week? No problem! Blinkers has a very powerful battery with a capacity of 3200mAh which will allow you to use it for as long as 2 weeks in a normal usage (2h riding per day). 

Light Power

In dark conditions, cyclists need to see the road ahead, and city light is not always intense enough. Blinkers comes with a front white light having 100 lumens of power output, which will allow cars to see you and you to illuminate the road ahead. 

​​​On the other hand, you want cars to see you from behind. Blinkers' rear red light has 30 lumens of power ouput and when the brake light is triggered, it goes up to 100 lumens.

Dimensions and Weight

Dimensions of Blinkers

Weight of Blinkers

Bike mounts

Front and Rear mounts

Both the rear (either under the saddle or in the rack) and the front mount only have to be fixed once onto the bike.

The front mount can be fixed in any kind of handlebar between 22-31.8mm diameter.

The saddle mount is fixed just right under the saddle, and can be fixed in almost every kind of bike.

Types of saddles

The rack mount can also be fixed in virtually every kind of racks: they often have fastening holes with standard measures at the back for red position lights. We have designed a mount which can be fastened to any of these standard holes with a pair of bolts and nuts.

Rack with standard holes

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Our perks

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Where we are and what we need

Blinkers went live for the first time in June last year when we launched a Kickstarter campaign in which we raised +50’000€ from +500 backers. This successful campaign made us realize that Blinkers is something that people and cyclists want because it helps solving a very important problem: cyclist’s safety in the road. Since the completion of that campaign we have been working hard to craft a top quality product in terms of functionality, durability, price and design.

We partnered with Zuhlke Technology Group, a top Swiss Engineering Firm, with vast expertise in Manufacturing and Electronics, and Sapetti, a top design studio, to achieve those goals, and we are currently very close to have a final product: the electronic circuit design is complete (component selection & PCB) and it only needs to be put into production; and the casing and the optics of Blinkers just need some small optimizations, but they are in the last steps of development.

So, as you read, the technical development is almost complete. At the same time, we are also in advanced conversations with manufacturing firms in Europe (mainly Germany and Spain) for the serial production of Blinkers: one that manufactures the tooling for the plastic parts, and another one that can produce the electronic circuit boards and assemble everything together. We have offers on the table, now we have to chose which one is the most suitable for us!

The reason why we are now coming to Indiegogo is very simple: we need more cash to finance the first production batch of Blinkers. Even though last year we raised capital from private investors, hardware development is very complex, cost intensive and requires a lot of upfront investment. The best way to overcome these financial challenges is with pre-orders, and a new crowdfunding campaign is the best option for us. And we believe that Indiegogo will allow us to attract even more backers.

Delivery timeline

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Who are we?

This is Velohub! A team of 5 young engineers and cyclists with the ambition of getting more and more people to hop on their bikes. Thanks to the countless kilometers in our bicycles and our backgrounds in mechanics, electronics and business, we have created Blinkers. But Velohub goes beyond that! Blinkers is only our first product...

Velohub makes smart technology for cyclists. It’s in this last sentence where you can find our three main singularities:

Smart

We build products that match our customer’s lives. Creating nice and smart designs that fit incredibly well on everybody’s bicycle.

Technology

Technology is our passion and our daily subject of discussion, and we want to use it to improve not only cyclists safety, but also their riding experience.

Cyclists

Why driving a car if we can ride a bicycle? Healthy, clean, fast, cheap and quiet. We know what it takes to be a cyclist and we always look for solutions to the problems we have.

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Risks and Challenges

Blinkers is in its last steps of product development, so we have eliminated the main risks related to component selection and technical feasibility. Right now, we are preparing and planning the start-of-production by talking with manufacturers. The biggest risks here are lead times and supply chain risks: we are estimating reasonable lead times for manufacturing the tools, assembling the electronics components, and assembling the casing, the circuit board and the optics; but we are also very exposed to manufacturers delays.