May 2012
1 post
Idea: Pseudorandom display
For a display, have an agreed-upon, and constantly changing, pseudo-random pixel/row/column update order. This would propagate up to the actual row/column selectors. This would mean that the signal couldn’t be observed except at the actual output of the display row/column selector, and would have to monitor each individual to grab the video data. This would mean monitoring and post process a...
January 2012
1 post
Idea: If I were to make a virtual globe
Earth globe:
ideally, Full google earth integration
realtime weather display with forecasts on touch
“pinch” zoom, with display centered at touch point
flick rotate
tap drag -> rotate with friction
tap tap drag -> continuous rotate
begin rotate after timeout
realtime/selected night/day...
October 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Python Tip: Properties with a parameter
This is probably”unpython” and whatever, but I do a lot of automation, and being able to access properties based on some index (like a port number) is pretty important. This is especially true since getting a property isn’t reading a variable, it’s actually reading the value from some piece of equipment.
And, in case pastebin dissapears:
# This was created based on a...
Silly Idea: Clockless Watch
Using a metal brush, a low pass filter, and a schmit trigger as digital clock source for the calculation circuit, you could make a horribly inefficient electronic watch that used the position of the sun (by a low res ccd or even photodiodes) and a compass to calculate the time. Can’t use a crystal or rc, because that would be cheating! Might as well just have it keep the time!
Idea: Cracked wafers?
Relating to the bandwidth segregated data transmission…
I picture chips
|=======| - photoelectric layer
|=======| - charge storage
|=======| - adjacent storage distribution
|=======| - logic
|=======| - diode and transistor junctions (photo).
photoelectric layer to supply power, probably wouldn’t have to be too efficient
store and filter the power
some sort of low voltage...
Scrambled for distribution?
Is it possible to scramble data so that the signal can be broken into channels based on an average over time? Usually in communication, the average is kept to zero using a known and syncronized psuedo-random sequence (a scrambler). Could the sequence be modified (by observation and modification or sub-channel) to allow distribution of data based on bandwidth capability? This would allow a bus with...
May 2011
3 posts
Idea: Wireless turn signal
Fancy mirror turn signals LED strip activated by wireless transmitter attached and powered to the actual turn signal light. The LED strip would be powered with 12v accessories.
Idea: Tire wear measurement
A low power, inductor powered, cheap microcontroller embedded in a tire could be used to detect and warn of tire wear. The microcontroller could measure the change in resistance of thin wire molded into the tires surface. When these filaments broke, from being exposed to the roads surface, a tire wear indication could be sent to the driver. When deeper filaments break, a warning indicator could be...
Idea: Automated map generation for driving video...
Pretty obvious idea. Using the aerial and street view of Google Maps, and some simple texture/feature recognition and “design rules”, maps for driving video games could be made. Actual road data would be pretty reliable. Stop lights and signs could either be found using street view at each intersection, or randomly assigned since players will fly through them anyways. Buildings,...
April 2011
2 posts
Useless Idea: Diffraction pattern on linear CCD...
For a cheap, high precision position sensor, could use a linear ccd from a scanner, project a laser through a diffraction grating (or pinhole) with a known diffraction pattern, then do some simple curve fitting/energy minimization of the visible pattern to find the position. Curve fitting rather than point tracking would be used to get sub pixel resolution. Since the light is directly from the...
Idea: Cell phone traffic lights
Sniff cell phone control channel data to find ESN. Calculate CRC32 or something similar for privacy, track movement by watching where the number pops up. Do this to all “visible” cellphones to create traffic flow pattern in town for light timing.
???
Edit: I suppose the cell companies could probably sell the data.
March 2011
1 post
Idea: Baby temperature monitor
Just a simple temperature monitor that you put in your babies blanket that starts beeping if the temperature gets too high or low.
November 2010
2 posts
Idea: Cloud redirect service
To post a link to an image or a document, the link, rather than pointing directly to the document resource, would point to the redirect service. This would check to see if the cloud resource was available and, if not, change the redirect to an available/redundant resource….maybe even hosted by a different provider. It could even perform load balancing by randomly choosing the redundant...
Speckle interferemotry for blood glucose level...
Maybe use speckle interferometry to measure blood glucose level by looking at the index of refraction of the aqueous humor of the eye (the clear bulge part in front of the iris).
Using a single laser
<to be continued>
Using absorption: http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/277/1/012053/pdf/1742-6596_277_1_012053.pdf
Patent using interferometry to measure index of...
September 2010
2 posts
Kids Toy: Squeaky Feet
Kids toy!
For a fancy version, using pressure sensors in or under the shoe, for a cheap version, using an accelerometer or spring mass switch. Controller could be leg or belt mounted.
When you walk, the controller would play back different sounds. Stomping, squeaky floor, etc. For the two sensor version, the sounds could be multi part or just segments played back as you moved forward. That way,...
Temperature Sensor Array
Use the top metal layer of a CMOS process to build structures that resonate at a specific frequency. Use the layer below to excite the resonance. Use the layer below that to build a similar structure and use as a reference. By measuring the difference in frequency between the two, small changes/differences in the structure (like length) could be detected. If possible, coat the top layer to a dark...
July 2010
4 posts
Idea Idea: Compass belt implementation
In the wired article about the compass belt, a complaint was that the motors were always buzzing away. I think a better implementation would be to only vibrate the motors on a change.
So, if you’re facing north, as you rotate, the motors would vibrate with direction change, but only remain vibration for a maximum of 500ms.
Idea: Fluidised flour bed for opticle table...
So, when making holograms, the total movement between the light, film, and object can’t be more than 1/2 to 1/4 the wavelength of the color of light you’re using (red is around 650nm). The less movement, the better.
Would flowing air into a block of flour (baking soda, or something similar), supporting the optical table, work to isolate vibrations? It would act like a super dampened...
Software Idea: Jump alarm clock
An alarm clock that looks for a “jump” pattern from the accelerometer. This should be pretty hard to copy with your hand once “calibrated” with a real jump. Yeah, so I have trouble waking up.
Software Idea: Excersize Helper
This has probably been done…but…
A little program that uses the accelerometer on a phone to count push-ups (not the diapers), jumping jacks, and sit ups…things you can do in your living room. It would be somewhat game oriented, where it would have a silly little beat and a fun “Wii” type voice counting your repetitions and encouraging you. For instance, if you...
June 2010
2 posts
Idea: Touch Pad Typing
Copy paste from chat, cause I’m lazy… me: Hrmm…I just had a thought for the toupad typing problem. me: You can’t feel the keys, so it’s easy to drift.So, why not have a vibrate that changes depending on how close to the edge of teh key you are?so, the more on center, the more “right” it will feel.the closer to the edge of the key you get, the more...
Idea: Building Dot Matrix Printer
It would use a small robot that would move around on the buildings face by pulling tethers. Electric paint sprayers and a vacuum hood would do the bulk of the work. Refilling would be done by retreating to home. Power would be delivered over one of the tethers. Colors would be mixed mid spray to keep from having to premix paints.
Ideally, the whole paint process could be completed at night.
...
April 2010
2 posts
Idea: Looking at the control response of people
Say you have a linear motor that can apply a force to a stick with a mark on it. You tell the person holding the stick to attempt to keep the stick positioned so the mark stays at some fixed point. What does the step function look like? Is there a difference between an athlete and some regular guy? How well can a person control a bouncing or nonlinear or some other crazy force pattern? How does...
Idea (not unique): Using deconvolved images for...
The idea was to use deconvoluted images to make an image sharper when viewed by a near or far sighted person. Could make distant signs sharper or help diagnose eye problems. For instance, a person with eye problems could sit in front of a screen (at a known distance, far or close). Deconvolved images could be displayed on the screen where the person would press buttons indicating which...
March 2010
5 posts
Idea: Redundant Cloud
In response to Picasaweb going down, I posted this:
“Hrmm…it sounds like someone needs to make a cloud redirecting service. To post a link to an image or a document, the link, rather than pointing directly to the document resource, would point to the redirect service. This would check to see if the cloud resource was available and, if not, change the redirect to an...
Data: Weight by resturaunt
It would be interesting to see the distribution of the weights of people entering different restaurants. Could place a “mat” scale at the entrance, then log all of the weights.
Idea: Resonant weight
Old idea. A voice coil with a weight would be attached to a surface. The weight would oscillate and tune to the frequency of the surface it was attached to, creating the most noise/vibration possible! Lots of mischievous uses (what if you attached it to a piece of plate glass!).
Might have some use in vibration testing, where it would find all of the vibration frequencies, and give you the...
Silly Control Idea: Splash free...
Wave dampening
Bob-on-a-string array that would be controlled to dampen (and possibly detect) waves in a liquid, such as a pool or shipping container. If placed in the corner of a pool, the bob array would absorb the wave’s energy.
“No Spill” Coffee Cup
Fluid would sit in a portion of a gimbal. A few vertical capacitive sensor strips would be placed around the cup to detect...
Idea: Dissolvable Plastic?
Would be interesting to look at the chemicals created during landfill decomposition. Then, knowing these chemicals, create a packaging that dissolves in their presence, ideally creating more to speed the reaction.
February 2010
3 posts
Nook-look.com →
Get (or put) wallpapers and screen savers for your nook!
Idea in progress: Laser Glasses
Augmented reality sucks without being able to augment reality. Usually, this is done by looking at a screen with an image captured by a camera. This means that you’re limiting your entire vision to that of the sensor of the camera. This is fine in the future when we have high tech cameras that surpass our eyes in sensitivity, but sucks now when all we really have to work with are webcams.
...
Idea: Annoying Mess
Computer vision software to point out messes in a room. Uses a laser beam to highlight messes in the room to annoy the mess makers so they’ll clean it up!
The CV system would probably use background subtraction to find the mess. Maybe with some statistical feature detection to ignore things such as a bag of bread moving around on a counter top. A time delay between detecting a mess and...
January 2010
6 posts
Idea: Aerodynamic rubber bands
Not sure if I posted this already…
Aerodynamic rubber bands!!!! Come on!!! Cross section cut would probably look like a teardrop, with the fat (possibly flat) side inward to make it possible to shoot and give it some mass compared to a flat band…even though this is aerodynamically backwards. Ideally, I would think the fat part would face forward, like a wing, giving the front of the...
Shmuck Idea: S/PDIF Dejitter
So, people with crappy audio/video sources and receivers that use PLL’s for SPDIF clock recovery complain could get a nice clean signal.
Basically, would decode the SPDIF signal and re-encode with a more stable PLL, maybe hiding timing errors in data bits or preamble bits.
Idea: Confocal Seismograph
That’s all. Would be very sensitive of course. Aperture and overall size could/would be large for high bandwidth. Point of focus would be attached to the mass.
Software Idea: Auto echo cancel for audio...
Auto echo cancel app for audio/video recording for smart phones since audio recording kind of sucks right now. Would attempt to find and cancel worst of the room reverberation. Would be a deconvolution problem that would probably be handled on a server rather than the actual device, like voice recognition is these days.
Idea: LCD Aperture
An LCD aperture for cameras. Would be a gimmicky feature for inexpensive cameras. Would use an LCD rather than leaf based aperture. Would allow programmable shapes to be used for aperture, making pretty pictures in blurred images.
Could use it for an ND filter, too.
But mostly, could use it for coded aperture deconvolution for focal blur removal and depth extraction!
Bad Idea?: Single pixel DLP and photomultiplier...
Obvious. Use a cheap single photomultiplier (can find them for $25) and a DLP chip. A lens system would focus and image onto the DLP. Activating single pixels on the DLP would direct the light into the photomultiplier, giving a detector resolution equal to that of the DLP. Gain could be increased, at the expense of resolution, by activating multiple pixels on the DLP. Similar to a DLP television,...
December 2009
9 posts
Down with the monopoly: Scientific Publisher...
Come on, disk space is practically free these days. Server where scientists can upload research papers so anyone can download them for free. Come on, $30 to read if orally administered baking soda increases race horse performance, with not a cent of that going to the author…wha!?
Obvious use of an idea that I want right now:...
For a useful reference manual, you need to be able to quickly get to the topic you’re trying to review or equation you’re trying to look up. This is PERFECT for a touch screen with a slick collapsible interface. Allowing an engineer to have all of his references, with all of his notes in digital form, able to upload/back up would be great.
Maybe the business would be some software to...
Idea: Music box player piano
Just that. A mini mechanical piano that uses keys to move levers to excite the teeth on a music box comb. Ideally, it would allow recording and playback with a few solenoids tied to the keys. That way, you could record and play back your own music.
Obvious Idea: Suspension Power
For an electric/hybrid vehicle:
Use an electromagnet placed in the suspension to recharge the battery, or apply power to the motor directly (whichever is the most efficient). The current from the electromagnet would be the current going to the electric motors.
An additional benefit would be electronic control of the suspension “dampening” forces. Since the maximum force would be at...
Idea: Rotational micro ratchet
Maybe useful for MEM’s.
I saw a TED show about a man with a broom handle and a weight. The weight had bristles so, when the handle was vibrated, the bristles would “ratchet” against the handle and move the weight up.
I think it would be better use rotations for this concept since you wouldn’t have to add tension waves.
Bristles would be angles and make contact with the...
Idea: The Wall Of/Off Topic!
Something like a digital picture frame that listens in on your conversation using fairly crappy (crappier the funnier the results) voice recognition to try to get a gist of what you’re talking about. Whatever the topic, it would show relevant pictures and video (probably muted) about whatever it heard.
It could use youtube, flickr, google image search, etc.
Ideally, it wouldn’t...
Idea: Auto Drift RC Car
Little RC car that drifts by itself. Would need a gyro or accelerometer and electronic compass. Would end up being a stability control system.
It would be intended for kids that couldn’t actually drift an RC car, but could let them have fun before they got bored (more likely) or help them learn by having different levels of assistance.
And yes, people already drift RC cars…although,...
Idea: Online bill pay service
Middleman service that charges $10/month or so to pay your bills, with a nice, easy to use “click buttons to pay” type interface. Bank interface sucks, plus you have to log into your account…which I hate to do since I don’t trust that my computer is hacked-free…and there’s no reason to log into a secure account like that just to pay a bill. Since you’re...
Idea: Average Animals
I saw an interesting project at http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average. You take multiple images of people that are mostly of less than average attractiveness and make very good looking people.
It would be interesting to see what average animals would look like. This could be extended to families of animals and up, possibly to find what the average animal looked like for a given phylum or...
November 2009
8 posts
Idea Variation?: Electronic Drum Sticks
My coworker is always banging on his desk with his fingers (he’s actually pretty damn good). The idea would be electronic drum sticks (I’m sure they exist, but maybe not in this form) that would “detect” the surface you were hitting and play the programmed sound clip.
So, you would get your drumsticks, have a selection of x many surfaces, hit the surface, then select the...
Idea: Scroll-wheel directory traversing
Holding the mouse over a folder and scrolling the wheel forward will go into that folder. Scrolling back will always go out of the current folder, up the folder hierarchy. Scrolling into a file will bring up a preview or details (depending on file type). When going in and out of folders, it will have an zoom in with alpha fade type effect, fading out the current level, and fading in the next...
Idea: B-Movie Video Chat
In chat, not much is original beings that so many people have said so much, if not directly, with the same meaning. This leads to, B-Movie video chat!
It’s a video chat client where movie clips are played rather than/with the text, or movie clips act as emoticons.
A big collection of scripts and movies are stored in a database. When you type a message, the scripts are searched for that...