Do you bike at night? Has your bike light ever shit the bed, leaving you stranded in darkness? That’s what happened to Alexis Tzannes after a tennis match that lasted into the evening. He tried biking home, only to find the battery in his bike light was dead. Instead, he opted to use the LED light on his iPhone and thus the idea for Bikelops (rhmyes with cyclops) was born.
Now you just have to help fund it.
Bikelops is simple and effective. Using the custom-built mount, users simply need simply snap their iPhones into place and hit the lights. The mount also helps funnel the LED into a more concentrated beam, allowing for more sight. And it keeps cyclists from getting in trouble with Johnny Law – as it turns out, bike lights legally required after a certain time.
The phone is also easily accessible for those cyclists who enjoy listening to music while on the go, or those in need of GPS to avoid getting lost.
The team behind Bikelops is hoping to raise $10,000 through Kickstarter to manufacture more mounts and support more devices. The current Bikelops model works only for the iPhone 5, iPhone 5S and iPhone 6.
After tinkering with several iterations of what Bikelops could look like, Tzannes finally created the 2.4 ounce polymer-based mount currently backed by 14 people for a total of $621.
Should the Bikelops brass meet their funding goal, they hope to put the mount into production by February of 2015 and ship product and prizes by the end of the month. Production and shipping could come even sooner, though, if you’re willing to crack open your piggy bank a little wider.
Though Bikelops sounds like a great little innovation, one major pitfall appears to be the battery life of the phone itself. If a light built specifically for a bike is able to run out of juice, then surely too could one’s iPhone.
According to Bikelops, though, they conducted tests with an iPhone 6 that shows, when GPS and Bluetooth are disabled and the home screen is activated minimally, the LED light could use about eight to nine percent of the device’s battery per hour.
But often we’re a multitasking folk and will employ the use of GPS, or Bluetooth, or music, or make a call to someone. Bikelops ran a second test, using GPS and the LED light, and found that the iPhone 6 uses about 10 percent of the batter every 30 minutes.
Harnessing the LED as a protective measure is a great first step for Bikelops. Once that’s perfected, maybe they’ll try and get in the battery game as well.
