Lumos will come in 2 sizes, medium and large.

Medium will fit heads between 54 - 59cm (21.3 - 23.2 inches) and Large will fit heads between 58 - 63cm (22.8 - 24.8 inches). To measure your head, get a flexible measuring tape and wrap it around the circumference of your head above your eyebrows, or, if you don’t have a measuring tape, find some string and compare it against a ruler to check your head size.

We're confident that for the vast majority of you Lumos will be a great fit. However if when you receive Lumos you find that it really does not fit well, we will work with you to rectify the solution. We think that it’s super important that your helmet fits well, so if we're unable to find a good solution for you, we would be happy to accept and process returns, and you have our thanks for giving Lumos a try!

Yes. Lumos will feature a rotary dial similar to the adjustment mechanisms you see on many helmets in the market. This will allow you to quickly and easily adjust the tension and how tightly it fits on your head.

Lumos will pass the requisite CPSC tests for bicycle helmets, and also EN1078 which is the corresponding standard for bike helmets in Europe. These are the exact same standards that all other bicycle helmets are required to go through before being allowed to go on sale in the US and in Europe.

Nope! We've designed and tested to ensure that there is no line of sight or bleeding of the front white lights to the wearer’s eyes.

Yes! Lumos basically features just one button on the helmet. Press it to turn it on, and press it again to switch to different flashing frequencies. This is subject to change still, but the current plan is that as you press the button, it switches to different modes in the following manner: Off -> Flash -> Flash Faster -> Solid -> Off.

Yes they do! If you go up to the section above on the turn signal there is a picture of the helmet from the back and front view. The back facing turn signal is a yellow arrow and the front facing turn signal is a yellow dash.

You can't/shouldn't dunk either the remote or helmet under water (which is the true test of what it means to be waterproof), but both the remote and helmet are strongly water resistant and have been designed to work in the rain.

We will start with the bottom line: Lumos is designed to be a complement, not a replacement to existing solutions and conventions. We urge all cyclists to know the rules of the road in their country, and follow them. Generally speaking, this means that you should provide hand turn signals if you are about to make a turn. Having Lumos does not exempt you from this law, so we strongly recommend to use the turn signals on Lumos purely as a complementary action to hand signals.

That being said, we have encountered many situations where we have not felt comfortable or safe to give a hand signal and have just one hand on the handlebar. And we've met hundreds of other cyclists who have felt that way many times as well. In these situations we hope that Lumos could prove helpful, and at least better than nothing.

If our dreams were to come true, so many people would be using Lumos that laws could eventually be updated to mention light turn indicators for bicycles. However that future is far off. In the meantime as with all things, you are ultimately responsible for your own safety, and you have to make your own best judgement when you're out riding.

We are still in the process of developing Lumos and moving it to production so this is just an estimate and so is subject to change, but we estimate that Lumos will weigh about 410g (14.5oz).
For comparison, a typical run of the mill standard lifestyle helmet weighs around 315 - 340g (11.1 - 12oz) and a hardshell skater style type commuter helmet weights around 410 - 440g (14.5 - 15.5oz).

Lumos lasts for about 2.5 hours of continuous use in flashing mode. If you wish to primarily use Lumos in the “solid” mode, it will last for about half that time.
You can use Lumos for all kinds of rides, but we designed it to be primarily for the urban commute. So if you use Lumos for ~30min/day, you can get away with just charging Lumos once every week!

Recharge Lumos via micro USB, the exact same port featured on many common consumer electronics such as the Amazon Kindle and Android phones.

Lumos will be available in two colors. Pearl White, and Charcoal Black. If there is sufficient interest, we *might open up for a 3rd color depending on feedback!

Unfortunately the lights inside Lumos cannot be replaced. One of our key design goals for the aesthetic and industrial design was to integrate the lights so seamlessly into the design of the helmet that when they were off, you would think that Lumos was just a regular helmet. That look of surprise and delight on a person’s face seeing the lights turn on for the first time was exactly the emotional response we were hoping for when we were developing our design.
Unfortunately a necessary but unintended result of this design was that the lights in Lumos cannot be replaced.

We’ve invested a lot of time to identify and work with a high quality helmet manufacturer BEFORE coming to you on Kickstarter. We’ve been working with this manufacturer for nearly a year now, prototyping and doing a ton of engineering work to translate the idea and concept into something that we have confidence that we can actually manufacture and deliver to you as a high quality product in the event that our Kickstarter campaign is successful.
We’re coming to the Kickstarter community now because through the work we have already done, we have brought this project all the way to the pre-production stage and we just need your support to get the money necessary to invest in tooling and a full production run.
Remaining development work that needs to be done is more on the production side of things, setting up our manufacturing process, going through the expensive independent lab tests, and ironing out the kinks that inevitably develop when setting up a new assembly line for a new product for the first time.

We’ve designed the wireless turn signals to be very easy to use and familiar by mimicking what you would normally do in a car. Before making a turn, simply press one of the two buttons to activate the corresponding left or right turn signal. This activates the turn signal lights on the helmet (both front and back turn signals), as well as a beeping sound to let you know that the turn signal has been activated. A light on the remote would also come on under the corresponding button you pressed, so that you can check and make sure that you pressed the correct one. After you’ve completed making the turn, simply press the button again to turn the signal lights off.

It is of course up to you to decide based on your use whether or not to take the controller with you each time you lock your bike. The remote is useless without the helmet its paired with so there is little incentive for a thief to steal it. Nonetheless we’ve certainly experienced ourselves how thieves apparently will steal ANYTHING on your bike that is not locked up.

So we’ve made the remote easy to remove and mount. A quick release mechanism allows you to remove the remote quickly and take it with you.

Yes! We have several patents filed and patent pending.

The wireless remote works off a 2.4 GHz RF (Radio Frequency) chip. These RF chips are more than powerful enough to handle the signaling feature and are also robust, reliable, and consume very little power, making it ideal for this use case. The remote is perpetually in sleep mode by default, but when you press it, it instantly wakes up, sends its signal to the helmet it is paired with (a 1-1 pairing with the helmet that just needs to be done once during first use), and then powers down again after you turn the turn signal off. Since the remote is off for the vast majority of the time, this allows the remote to last for months before its coin cell battery would need to be replaced.

Actual lifetime will vary by use, but we estimate that it should last for 6 months before needing to be replaced. The remote uses a CR2032 coin cell battery that you can find in any drug store.

Lumos features over 80 super bright LEDs to ensure that you’re super visible at night. However, these lights are intended primarily to be seen, not to see. (ie. The lights from Lumos are not intended to work as a spotlight that you can use to see the road ahead of you)

Further testing is required, but our testing thus far indicates that the front lights will give out about 44 lumens of light while the back lights will give out about 38 lumens.

What does that mean? How does that compare? Well the Serfas Thunderbolt (http://tinyurl.com/o5gylyt) is a solid, quality bike light, and is the bike light we personally use and have been really happy with. We tried to benchmark ourselves to that standard, and ended up quite favorably compared to the 35 lumens that the Serfas Thunderbolt offers. Light & Motion is another excellent bike light brand, and you can see how Lumos compares to their lights yourself here (http://tinyurl.com/nbwuncu).

Our Kickstarter backers mean the world to us and we want all of you to be fully satisfied with the product that you receive and helped make possible.

As such, Lumos will come with a one year warranty that ensures it arrives to you free of manufacturing defect. Should your unit arrive with an issue, contact us and we will resolve it for you. If it cannot be resolved remotely, then we will replace it for you if necessary.

We know that many backers back projects on Kickstarter to be part of the entrepreneurial journey in making the product a reality. We absolutely embrace that, and want you guys to be a part of it. At the same time we recognize that no one wants a deluge of email updates, so a balance needs to be struck. Our intention is to provide updates via the Kickstarter platform once every week or so during campaign; and every 4 - 6 weeks or so post campaign. You will be able to control your email settings on this via your Kickstarter profile settings page.

As you can see in the reward tiers, we have 3 delivery batches planned and scheduled. The first batch is projected to deliver in April 2016, the second batch in May 2016, and the third batch in June 2016.
We’ve invested a lot of time to identify and work with a high quality helmet manufacturer BEFORE coming to you on Kickstarter. We’ve been working with this helmet manufacturer for nearly a year now, prototyping and doing a ton of engineering work to translate the idea and concept into something that we have confidence that we can actually manufacture and deliver to you as a high quality product in the event that our Kickstarter campaign is successful.
Because of this, we have confidence that our production plan and timeline makes sense and is achievable. We hope to avoid the all-too-common fate of many Kickstarter projects that get severely delayed, and that was the major reason we spent a whole year to date doing preparation and our homework. Nonetheless as with all projects, delay is possible. Setting up a manufacturing process for a new product, and especially for a new helmet, is very difficult. We’ll need to iron out the kinks that inevitably develop when setting up a new assembly line for a new product for the first time. We’ve got the right skillset, experience, and partners to be up to the challenge, but we cannot make any guarantees. Our hope is that you believe in the product and in us enough that you support us to help us make this happen.

We would like to create a Lumos model for kids, but at the moment have no immediate plans to do so. If there is sufficient interest and demand for it, we may accelerate our plans though! If this is something you’re interested in, let us know by filling this short survey (http://goo.gl/forms/VQ0ZZ5FtwN).

Kickstarter is a site that connects people like yourselves to independent creators like us. We’ve been working on Lumos for nearly 2 years now and we're coming to Kickstarter because we need your help to take this project to the next level.

The way we hope you think of it is that this is not just an opportunity for you to buy a product, but to be part of creating something that you think should exist in the world.

To learn a little bit more about what Kickstarter is, you can find out more here: https://www.kickstarter.com/hello

No, only after the campaign has closed (and if it has been a success of course!) will any money be taken out of your account.

Thank you very much for your interest! We have been overwhelmed with the positive response to Lumos and have been receiving many inquiries from people interested in retailing and distributing Lumos.
We would love to take a discussion forward with you. Our plan is to select a small number of shops to do a pilot run with in the near future, and we will open applications to this sometime after the close of our Kickstarter campaign. We’re looking for upmarket stores that place an emphasis on stocking high quality, well-designed products, and providing excellent customer service. As a small business ourselves, our preference is to partner with small, owner run stores.
Please fill leave your contact details here (http://goo.gl/forms/UxHyZ7YvvH) and we will follow up with you. During the duration of our Kickstarter campaign please allow for some lag before getting back to you as we will have our hands full during that time!

We’d love to help answer all of your questions. Please contact us at press@lumoshelmet.co

We have been trying to get quotes, but have only been able to get an estimated range of $15 - $20 USD. Because of this, what we're going to do is charge a $15 flat rate for shipping for all countries, and if it ends up costing more than that, then we will absorb that cost.

We have had to deal with this as consumers ourselves, so we thoroughly understand why we have been receiving this question a lot. It is a very annoying, tedious process!
We've started looking into this issue, but it is proving to be quite complex. Here is what we think we're gonna do:
On Kickstarter we'll just charge the $15USD for shipping (this excludes VAT). We cannot do this VAT thing for every country that we're shipping to, but right now it looks like the 2 most popular countries are going to be the USA and the UK, and for these 2 countries we will most likely find a way to pre-pay the VAT on your behalf, and collect the money from you separately via paypal before we ship it out to you. That way you guys can avoid the customs and 'administration' fee.
However like we mentioned, we're still learning the process involved here, and we'll have to work within the constraints of what’s possible from customs. We're just communicating what we would like to do and what we think is possible, but this is not something we can guarantee will happen. (but we will absolutely work to make it happen!)

We do now! If you go to the new $99 reward level you should be able to find Norway as one of the countries we ship to.

The way it works with Kickstarter is once the campaign is over (assuming its successful), we'll collect that information from you guys via surveys post campaign. We'll keep you guys updated on the details, but don't worry, we will definitely be following up on this.

Lumos does not have a visor. With the design aesthetic that we were shooting for and location of the lights on the helmet, we could not incorporate a visor into the design without the visor interfering with the lights. Lots of cyclists told us that a visor was not a major priority for them, and so for this version of Lumos we’ve dropped it as a feature.

It depends. Like with any other bike light or car light for that matter, if it is broad daylight with direct sunlight, then the lights will not be very visible. The darker it is out, the more prominent the lights will be.

For the turn signals, you should always use hand signals and only use Lumos as a supplement to that, even at night. During the day this would be especially true as your hand signals would be readily visible.

We have been getting so many questions on this so we wanted to make sure we had a dedicated answer to this question!

We know that there are tons of cyclists in Australia and we are VERY interested in bringing Lumos to Australia. However, there are some very important reasons why we have held back on delivering to Australia (as well as New Zealand and Japan) at this time.

Australia is one of the few countries in the world that has mandatory helmet laws. It’s not so much a question of passing Australia’s helmet safety standards, but its cost. Each batch of helmets brought into the country has to be sampled and physically tested to pass the tests. This is fantastic from a safety and quality control point of view, but these requirements directly affect our costs to deliver units to Australia, and we need to do more research before we can have confidence to be able to say that, yes, we can get this done without the costs being too high for you.

That being said, because so many of you are interested in Lumos, we are going to accelerate our efforts to get this done as soon as we can! We want to thank you so much for your interest and support and please know that we’re figuring this out.

If you leave us your name and email in this short survey (http://goo.gl/forms/Ji8AL8M4xH), we will use it to keep you updated on the latest developments on this front as they happen.

We’ve getting several of these requests so we’re going to look into this. We should definitely be able to offer this as an additional option for you, but unclear on what the additional cost on that would be to be honest. We’ll be looking into this and will give you an update once we know more!

Our current design is such that each remote has a 1 - 1 pairing relationship with the helmet, so for this design there cannot offer an option to purchase extra wireless remotes. (FYI, if you lose a remote you can purchase a replacement that will still work by resetting the helmet and pairing with the new remote when it arrives. But the helmet cannot be paired with 2 different remotes at any one time.)

However we’ve been getting this question quite a bit so we’re going to be looking into it, and if we can make it happen, we’ll provide an update on this post-campaign!

In the meantime, what we’re definitely going to do is offer you the option post campaign to purchase additional mounting units. You can have one for every bike you have and since the remote is easy to remove from the handlebar mount via quick release, just move it over whenever you want to use a different bike. We’re actually not sure what the additional cost for extra mounting units would be to be honest, but we’ll provide updates once we know more!

Unfortunately the helmet battery will not be replaceable. However, the battery will last for > 1000 cycles, so if you use Lumos for commuting and recharge once every week, thats ~1000 weeks, which is 19 years! Helmets are generally recommended to be replaced every 2-3 years due to degradation of the material itself, so we've made it such that the battery should not be the limiting factor here.

A small yellow light behind the power button on the helmet will go off when the battery is getting low to let you know that you should recharge it.

Currently we only offer LUMOS in M and L size which fits head circumferences from 54cm(21.3inches) to 62cm(24.4inches). We would really like to offer a bigger and smaller option, but based on the quantity we have now, it is very hard for us to make another set of tools to extend our offering at this time.
To address this issue we've created a interest list (http://goo.gl/forms/frZsDd1pLA) for people who would like an XL or S size. Once we have sufficient demand for an XL or S size we would be more than happy to expand our offering to include that size!