Courtesy Horn - The Nice horn.
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This is certainly cool. I kinda want that in my car now.
That would be a welcome feature, I'm sure we've all encountered situations where the friendlier horn would be useful.
I believe the Gen1 Volt does have some type of pedestrian warning "horn" or sound on one of the stalks. No such horn on my Gen2 as we have an audible artificial noise generated at low speeds to alert pedestrians of the Volt's stealthy presence.
I believe the Gen1 Volt does have some type of pedestrian warning "horn" or sound on one of the stalks. No such horn on my Gen2 as we have an audible artificial noise generated at low speeds to alert pedestrians of the Volt's stealthy presence.
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I was following a man walking in the middle of the street today because the sidewalks were blocked with snow. The noise maker on my Bolt never warned him I was behind, he didn't hear it with his hoodie over his ears. I wanted him to know I was there so that he wouldn't have a heart attack if ever he turned around. Didn't mind waiting for him to reach the street corner. If I had been driving my ICE I would have let the transmission in neutral for a moment to change the engine sound level, that does the trick usually. With the horn on my Bolt I would have caused a fatal surprise for certain.
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Yeah, I've utterly failed to find a way to be at all subtle with the Bolt's horn. With my other cars I've been able to figure out a way to lightly tap or quickly punch the horn button to give a very brief "meep!" sound, but the Bolt's horn bellows no matter what I do.
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You're so right!
When I traveled to France in the 70's I drove a Renault that had a two level horn, one subdued for the "city" and one for the "country". The "city" one had a separate lever on the dashboard. Two levels like headlamps, city and highway.
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I was just thinking about this today. The blare horn (and lack of a courtesy beep) is one of (only) 3 things I dislike about my Bolt.
I ran back across a little party horn. I might keep it handy and roll down the window the next time I need a "meep".
By the way, do you think GM engineers frequent this site as a way to get customer feedback?
I ran back across a little party horn. I might keep it handy and roll down the window the next time I need a "meep".
By the way, do you think GM engineers frequent this site as a way to get customer feedback?
The Spark EV has a quick low-level beep, but it's on the stalk that controls high/low beams. I think it's forward to switch from high beam to low beam or vice versa, and towards you for a quick beep and flash of the headlights. I'm used to forward for high beam and backward for low beam, so there were a few times when I would honk and flash the lights at oncoming cars when all I wanted to do was to switch to low beam. Kind of embarrassing.
Perhaps a custom noisemaker, enabled by the high beam wire at the headlight assembly, that only makes noise when the low speed pedestrian warning is also enabled? Even the simple "beep" device of a PC when it passes POST would probably be adequate. My problem is that such a design would beep every time I opened my garage door.
I see a new "Project" in the making!
Much missed versatile feature that would be useful on any vehicle. Excellent for bringing FoneZombies back to the reality of an aging green light.
This is an interesting idea.... flash highbeams to make a pedestrian horn sound. At speed on the highway, flashing lights making a small sound wouldn't be heard (good), at low speeds flashing light AND making a sound would help the circumstance where the pedestrian may have a hoodie over his ears. You'd need a one shot relay... a relay that comes on for a brief period then won't fire again until it is switched off and back on. Easy EBAY item.
I love the idea of a bicycle bell for a pedestrian horn.
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I have the feeling that a bicycle bell would confuse the heck out of a pedestrian and might even cause them to step further into your path if they think they're blocking a bike.
A very neat little device. Depending on how you name the sound files on the device it will play once per button press, or loop or randomly pick a sound file. https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-audio-fx-sound-board/triggering-audio . That youtube video was sooooo freaking long just to get to the good parts...killin' me.
You could just hook up a relay to the highbeam power wire and pull any of 11 pins to ground on this board.
Anyway,
MP3 board ...
Small amp:
You could just hook up a relay to the highbeam power wire and pull any of 11 pins to ground on this board.
Anyway,
MP3 board ...
Small amp:
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564 Posts
Oh man, I would love to see someone hook this up to their car with some great sound clips like the Price is Right "fail" horns...
Youtube how-tos: life is too short. Please just write it down-- less total time spent for authors, literally thousands of hours saved for consumers of a popular advice chunk.
Per aj4px, Adafruit et al shall set you free. You can be master of a million transistors, for peanuts. Don't be fooled into thinking "tech" is hard. The barriers were always more about convenient access to parts, and component packaging that works on a bench at home. Those problems are solved.
It should be noted that this will *not* play MP3 files. It plays WAV and OGG files.
That being said, there are free converters for MP3 to OGG that would work great. The car sound from the Jetsons comes to mind...>
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