commute lights
High-power LEDs have been making tremendous progress. (There are LED car headlights now.) I'd been planning to replace or augment my halogen bike headlights with HIDs, but the urgency was gone this past year. Now LEDs are encroaching on the high-brightness market, and with my longer (and later) commute some kind of upgrade is pretty likely soon. I'm hoping to try out some more commuting routes this weekend, and I might try bike commuting next a few times next week since I'll be working the late shift.
In the meantime, I've just gotten my latest order from Woot!, a head-mounted 3-watt LED driven off 4 AA batteries. I've strapped it to my bike helmet without any difficulty, although the added weight of the batteries will take some getting used to. I don't think it's as bright as my 55-watt halogen light, but it is bright enough for me to see the road, and drivers will certainly see it. (And on my helmet, I can point it at them if needed.) And it adds redundancy. My present system has 2 lights (55w and 35w), so I'm covered for a bulb burning out, but only one power source. This would be independent.
It's got 2 brightness levels, with 4- and 25-hour battery life. It's designed for hunting, so it's got some odd additional features. It's got red LEDs for night vision. (Might be good for night repairs, although the dim white would probably suffice.) It's got a blue LED that can be added to the red ones for seeing blood. (I guess people hunt in the dark and then need to follow blood trails when they only wound the prey they couldn't quite see.) The red+blue looks like a good combo for being visible to other traffic. The red LEDs can also be set flashing.
There's a diffusing lens that can go in front of the white or colored LEDs to give a wider beam, and it's a more-even spread than I've seen from other lights.
The battery pack itself (at the back of the head) also has a red flasher, presumably to keep your hunting buddies from (accidentally) shooting you in the back in the dark. It could be an additional rear blinker for cycling, although it's not as bright as the blinkers already on the bike.
I've generally been opposed to the notion of helmet-mounted lights because the purpose of the helmet is to crush to absorb impact, and putting some non-crushable material between my head and the impact just seems like a bad idea. But this is pretty small, and there's no substantial metal to it (besides the batteries, in the back).
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