We’ve all been there. You are sitting at a red light, waiting. Wait. Wait. It’s starting to feel like you’ll never get a chance to go, like you’re going to live and die at this intersection without even moving an inch. You start writing your will in your head, waiting for the hunger to hit, as an ambulance rushes by in your rearview mirror.
Suddenly, the light is green. The ambulance, upon arrival, stuns your constant traffic lights to allow you to cross the lane safely. “How does it do that,” you wonder, “and how can I do it?” As it turns out, the answer is simple – and extremely illegal.
The kind people at The Drive told us about the exploits of Peter Fairlie, a hacker and YouTube tinkerer. Fairlie has done several projects involving the Flipper Zero, a Swiss Army knife for electronics testing – RFID, infrared, radio transmission; you name it, Flipper can do it.
But Flipper itself cannot control traffic lights. Instead of radio waves, emergency vehicles use light to communicate with traffic lights – infrared lights, with enough brightness to make it through even the sunniest of days, invisible to the human eye. Flipper’s infrared LEDs were powerful enough to control nearby devices, but Fairlie realized that traffic lights would require more than that.
So Fairlie hooked up an array of infrared LEDs from a security camera. He knew the blinking frequency that the traffic lights near him would be looking for — 10, 12, and 14 Hz — so he set Flipper to generate that frequency and send it outputs through the GPIO pins. With the more powerful infrared array spinning at the right speed, Fairlie built a DIY emergency vehicle transmitter — he could snap his fingers and turn a red light green.
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While this is an interesting project, it is of course extremely illegal. 18 USC §39, including an offense punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to six months — or both. Making these devices for others is even worse, with sentences increasing to one year for any individual caught selling “traffic priority transmitters”.
So yes, you can change the lights on your daily commute. It’s not even that hard, with a little technical know-how and a soldering iron. Just, don’t really go out and try it — we can’t get your clicks if you’re in jail.
