Day: November 14, 2008

New gadget fools the light
into thinking your bike is a car.
(Photo © J. Maus)

Have you ever biked up to an intersection and had the sinking feeling that the traffic signal sensors don’t know you’re there?

A new gadget (that’s still a prototype at this point) just might solve that problem. Here’s the news from Wired Magazine:

Richley spent a decade lugging an oscilloscope to intersections, measuring the signal voltages to determine what kind of signal the loop sensors used. He discovered that they vary, “so I came up with a technique that scans for frequency and accommodates the pulsed mode of modern sensors,”…Push a button and Richley’s gadget creates a brief, but strong, magnetic field that simulates the presence of a much larger conductor — say, the body of a car — and triggers the inductive sensor that lets the light know a vehicle is waiting.

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