Adding an audible turn signal indicator - Scooter Focus
Have you ever found yourself driving along quite happily, but when you look down at your dashboard you see one of your indicator lights is blinking? With a helmet on, the engine running and wind noise, the quiet "clicking" of most indicators is pretty hard to hear and so unless you remember to cancel your signal, it may stay on much longer then you intend.
This can be annoying to other road users and it can be dangerous to you. If a car on a road to the right thinks that you are about to turn right because you've accidentally forgotten to turn off your right indicator, it may pull out in front of you and cause an accident.
The best way to remind yourself to cancel your indicator is to add an audible signal which is louder than the "click" you get from the standard signal unit. This is easy to do and costs less than $10. That's not much to spend for your safety.
All you need to do is to wire a small 12v buzzer or beeper across each of your indicator lights. I found the easiest way to do that was in the dash assembly, taking the voltage from the left and right turn indicator arrows, but you could wire then directly across the turn indicators themselves if it's easier. Each indicator bulb has two wires going to it. One wire is the ground (negative side of the battery) and the other side goes between +12v and ground (or open circuit) when the indicator is operating. If you wire the buzzer between these two connections, each time the light comes on the buzzer/beeper will sound. Most buzzers/beepers have to be wired the right way around, so typically the red lead will go the the +12v side and the black lead to the ground (battery negative) side.
A typical 12v buzzer/beeper draws so little current (usually under 20mA) that it's a negligible drain on the battery. You can find suitable buzzers/beepers at electronic components vendors such as:
If you have some experience with electronics you can do the job with just one buzzer/beeper if you use a pair of diodes as shown below.
Diodes allow current to flow only in one direction, so you can join the left and right indicator signals without having both directions flashing all the time (as you would if you didn't use the diodes). Any general purpose diode will do, such as a 1N4003 or 1N4001. If you don't have electronics experience, just get two buzzer/beepers!
I've found the additional audible signal to be very useful. I can hear it even with a full face helmet on and it's a very effective reminder to cancel the indicator.
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