2. Regarding throwing rocks: my dad (who I cannot use humor without mentioning) claims he used to carry around little steel ball bearings for dealing with drivers who endangered him or otherwise gave him shit when he was on his bike. As with many of his stories, I do not know how much (if any) of this story is true, but the important thing is that in one telling he exclaimed, "Let's see you catch me in traffic, you cracked-windshield-ass motherfucker."
I used to park somewhere off-campus, because it was quicker to walk from there to campus than in the campus lot. Eventually, they cracked down and started enforcing the lot's privacy. Since I was going to be very late to class, I just stuck around and talked to the security guard who would have cited me if I'd gone off the lot. Anyway, he mentioned the ball bearing thing too, so it might not be all that rare.
Hum. I've only ever encountered bike-haters at night and on rural roads around here. They're almost always blasting their high beams at me and occasionally drunk and shouting. I decided against carrying one of those giant halogen light-guns since they're too heavy, and eggs were a bad idea because they might break and leave me covered in noisome goo. I ruled out cartons of rotten milk and socks full of tar for the same reason.
On this note, I'm really fucking tired of huge trucks and SUVs with their lights built to heights that fuck with visibility of anyone driving vehicles not designed for compensation. I've thought over vengeance a bit. While this doesn't help cyclists, my ultimate lean towards how to handle it involves adjustable mirrors.
Until recently, I had pretty much no particular idea how practical (or affordable) it might be to set up. Due to having played with something similar enough that I could reuse some existing parts/code, I may have a marginally better idea, though still far from a perfect one.
I'll probably edit this later, but a vague idea of the parts needed:
- Servos with a couple kg of torque, allowing 90 degrees of rotation aren't devastatingly expensive ($10) at the right places.
-Two servos to control X/Y of the mirror angle would be about 20 bucks, but if one can find a mirror that looks like a tube cut in half, altitude (within like 20 degrees?) might be mostly irrelevant. (Anyone better at math is more than welcome to correct me on this.) Maybe a kind of elliptical bowl might be better, to handle cases where the azimuthal angle is a little bit (but not entirely) off? - Speaking of the mirror, I have no idea how much it'd cost or where I'd find the described curvature, but I'd need one.
- Some basic light detection stuff. A photodiode with an up-amp and a couple resistors can be adjustably sensitive. I think some light-to-frequency/voltage devices are also around and might not be terribly expensive, especially if one can score free samples:
- A cheap and basic photoresistor, an up-amp, a few couple resistors, and a potentiometer all together should probably still be under $15.
- An ADC and one of those more sophisticated light-to-frequency things shouldn't be much different in price, but the necessity of this component set is mutually exclusive with the line immediately above.
- One more servo to sweep the light detection device.
- Possibly (not certainly) Some kind of reflective, vertically elliptical, satellite-dish so that the light sensor only has to be horizontally aligned with a headlight, letting us ignore the vertical angle.
- A medium breadboard, because there are going to be fuck-ups before the thing is worked out.
- 8051 microcontroller chip to move the servos. Cheap or free, depending on sample availability.
- Some way to control the fucking thing from the front of the car (requires more investigation, but probably simple if asking in the right place).
- Power source. (Need to investigate.)
Basic operation:
1) Clean filthy rear window.
2) Be somewhere where drivers sit on the left.
3) When an offending vehicle is behind, pres butan to get the light detector diode to sweep once, getting the azimuthal angle of, let's say, the left headlight. (Could use a 180 sweep for both and then just pick the brightest headlight. Whatever.) Thing stores where the offending headlight is and then rotates the mirror to face almost-but-not-quite-towards it, and then slowly pans the mirror back and forth a bit, letting us get away with not needing perfect accuracy, while still returning enough annoying reflection to the driver behind that they would like to fuck off.
4) Figure out how to explain what the fuck is going on in the back of your car to police officers.
5) Figure out how to mount it solidly enough that it won't pose an enormous hazard in an accident. Fuck. It's got a mirror. Of course it'll pose a hazard. Scrap project....Fuck. This has to be my new procrastinatory high. Back to work.
EDIT: Fuck the attempted correction that this forum keeps trying to perform on nested lists.[/list]
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Topic: Driving Can Be Frustrating (Read 33763 times)