Thought some of you might be interested in a toy I made for a 2½ year old for a Christmas present -- a working model pedestrian crossing. He had just started getting fascinated by traffic lights and crossings, and this seemed like too good an opportunity for an educational toy.
There's a detailed description and pictures at
Well done - good exercise and well made.
Andrew Gabriel expressed precisely :
a purpose made rotary switch to operate the phases, I spent hours occupied playing with it.
Nicely executed - will you be releasing the software and circuit?
Buy some lego and let the kid make his own. Including the programming, its quite easy if you have the programmable brick. Its not cheap though.
A brilliant bit of work. Best however to warn the littl'un what a nightmare puffin crossings are. One near me if you stand ready to cross the pedestrian bit cancels itself after a while and you never get a green man. The detectors must be lined up wrongly and do not believe you are waiting to cross unless you stand about 6 feet away! The local authority recently changed a puffin to a pelican near us after at least one fatal accident apparently because some elderly persons are lost without a red or green man the other side of the road. In busy areas it is often impossible to see the lower level signals if there is a crowd waiting to cross.
Interesting -- we have boxes full of lego which is 40+ years old stored away, but no "programmable brick". I guess my knowledge of lego is 40+ years behind. ISTR we have some bricks with tiny festoon lamps in them, and a motor module.
He has some giant lego, but I don't think he's shown any great interest in it. OTOH, it's actually a lego look-a-like which doesn't work as well as real lego. We could start introducing real lego over the next 6 months.
My younger son is really into the Lego NXT stuff...had more parts for Christmas! Has entered as part of a First Lego League team for two years running.
I was given a broken older 'brick' and managed to fix that, so we'll play with that soon..!
I like the crossings in Dublin and parts of the USA where you get a countdown indicator to when the traffic will stop.
Yes, I like those too, but many UK crossings are not that simple. They do gap sensing in the traffic, and so usually bring the traffic stop forward relative to the timer, which only acts as a backstop to handle the worse case. This means the traffic stop often isn't predictable in advance.
Sid
Nice. I really wish I could do that stuff - but I'm afraid electronickery is a whole area of "diy" (for want of a better phrase) which is a complete and utter closed book to me. Over the years I've often wanted a customised electronic gadget to do some task or other (invariably some form of timing or switching) but wouldn't have even the first idea where to start. I've posted here in the past for advice on stuff and have had well-meaning replies along the lines of "Dead simple, just get yourself 1 Y65GFD87N thyroidistor and connect it to a flipflop
567-type ICD and vary the gain on the upper pin 4 until the silicomagnet timing falls..." and it's "Whoosh!" here.Next lifetime maybe.
David
Well, yes. There's a reason why traffic lights are placed so high. It's a pity that it never occurred to anyone that the same reason applies to pedestrian lights.
I can't see the point of moving the red/green man from the other side of the road to this side. I can think of no advantages but *lots* of disadvantages.
How times change, my old chap made me something similar 50 odd years back using Meccano. I turned the little handle which rotated a wooden 'cotton-reel' wrapped with a piece of tin-can cut to shape to give the correct sequence, with spring loaded contacts.
Reasons were given in the various Puffin crossing docs I read. Pedestrians are looking in the direction of the oncoming traffic, and more likely to spot a vehicle which isn't going to stop. Crossing only wants to signal to pedestrians which haven't started crossing. Once they've started crossing, the crossing monitors their progress and has no need to give them any signals. There are Puffin crossings with low and high pedestrian signals on the same pole.
(Remember the crossing scene in "Rain Man", albeit american?)
I only used one for the first time a few weeks ago. What I noticed as a sort of advantage was when a tall vehicle is stopped on (or partly on) the crossing - which often blocks the view of the red/green light on the opposite pavement.
Ironic that high lights are there for vehicles - but it would often be nice to have French-style repeaters at low level for them! (There are several sets of lights round here which are effectively unviewable by a driver stopped at the line - and with no repeaters on the other side of the junction.)
Cool. Next project maybe a crossing road junction on a square plank of wood, with traffic and pedestrian lights and approaching vehicle detect? If you get the software down to a fine art, I could recommend marketing it to a few councils around here.
OTOH, I've peeked inside the control boxes of various traffic signal equipment. Horribly complex, but probably is monitoring things like bulb failure, emergency vehicles and phasing of other signals.
I find that the pedestrian lights are usually aligned so that they are clearly visibly from the road. This means that, initially, one glimpses a red light (a signal to "stop" overriding one to "go") and then, as the full picture becomes clear, one realises that traffic has a green light.
Chris
That seems pretty flimsy. And it seems to me more likely that the pedestrian will cross on red, without that warning red light being in front of them. I've known it happen a couple of times, on both occasions with people who didn't hesitate at the roadside. Once I think they were fooled by a car stopping for a green light (the reverse of the problem you describe). The other time they approached from the right and so had a perfect view of a green light (for vehicles) but were never in a position to see a red light.
IMO there's simply no substitute for a red light in the pedestrian's path.
The web page might be enhanced with an animated gif stepping through the phases?
Owain
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