I wonder if electrical test equipment has a lot of the production and development costs tied up in the display and processing. Could you make, for instance, a voltage measurment tool that plugs into your USB port and gives you the results on your PC? With this you could go further using regular windows software and the like to send signals to the equipment like range settings. Also, you could store the data and sample it to do things that act like an osciliscope. The nice thing is you could test small circuits and the like for much cheaper than normal. Like if you want to look at a digital signal you could examine it on your computer. Also you could look at all sorts of analog signals. I think this might be a very simple thing to do. The only thing is you might not get large resolution with USB, serial, or even firewire ports. Maybe you could utilize a ethernet port? Or the sound input? Hmmmmm.... There are some interesting things you MIGHT be able to do....
Two ideas:
1. try to normalize for the time of day.
ex: you tend to weigh more at 5:00 and less in the morning.
if you set the scale to normalize for the morning, then you
can compare how you are doing more reasonably even if you forgot to weigh yourself that morning and remember at 5:00.
2. wieght historgram.. fuzzy weight.
Get a better picture of how much you waeight by averaging it (or something like average: wighted average decay average. blah blah blah.) Now when you find out that you generally weigh less this month than last, you notice improvement and have statistical significance to back it up.
I was looking online today and found lots of used laptop LCD's. I thought these would be great fun to use in a home project. After thinking about the uses I came up with an idea for having them located throughout the house assembled with wireless networking, a small local boot disk and some sort of minimal user interface.
Bathroom - Many people get up and listen to the radio in the bathroom in the morning. Others listen to their CD's. But who wants to drag in different CD's all the time and load them up. What if you could have your little LCD screen setup with some speakers. When you come in you hit power and within 2-3 seconds it comes on and offers up personalized data. You could listen to your own music from a server somewhere in the house. Or watch the end of a show you couldn't stay awake for last night. Or catch the morning TV or internet news. Also you could catch an online radio station or just have it show a picture slide show of some of your favorite vacation pics to distract from the drudgery of going to work... It could guess who the user is by time of morning or you could get fancy and have a bluetooth watch or phone on hand that it would identify with your profile. More simply you could have several power buttons each one attached to a particular user so when it starts up it works for YOU right away.
The great thing is these would only need to be turned on when you are in the room where you are using it. If you had bluetooth devices on you like a watch or phone, it could turn on/off the system when you come in and out of range. I suppose RF-ID tags might work better for this. You could have it on your belt or if small enough in your wallet or on your keychain***. Or perhaps you would need some sort of other sensors in the house to tell when you go from one room to another. You'd probably want to say, leave on the kitchen device until you get near another device like in a bathroom, bedroom or garage.
*** If the tag was on your keychain you might have some way to figure out where your keys were if you lost them in the house. Check the network to see what room it's in or what sensor they are closest to.
Some, maybe many, people would find the switching annoying so you could of course hit a button or something that just turns it on. Especially if you were having a party or someone without an account wanted to stay and watch. I guess you could include some sort of sensor to see if anyone is still in the room. If say you come in and turn on your music. Then comes in someone else, when you go to another room, it could switch to their user account since they are the only one left in the room. But it would stay for the time being on the same music or video that was on so that if they were watching that it wouldn't get interupted.
Well, this topic could be really broad. I think it's hard to define in one sitting but this seems like it would be really nice. I mean, many people spend say $100 on a boom box for their bathroom. And maybe $30 on a crappy alarm clock that has bad features. Then there are others who spend tons of money on fancy alarm clocks with built in nature sounds and the like. Also many people spend at least $100 for a kitchen TV or TV-VCR. With this system you could replace most of those devices. You could have just one terminal in each place say bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, etc. If you had your calendar loaded it could remind you to do stuff while you are doing things around the house or lounging watching a show. Also it could easily factor in waking you up on time. And being a multimedia platform you could have it wake you up in all sorts of great ways. Video, sound, pictures.... A tempting video game.... I guess a drawback would be that if it was off sometimes you wouldn't be able to read the time off of it. Or say you wake up in the middle of the night and want to know how much time you have to sleep. None of that with this system. Of course, if it was on when you were in the room and sleeping I guess it could just display the time in a dim view, and then brighten up when it's time to awake.
There really are lots of possibilities for this. From my original idea, i think you don't really need a big laptop screen. Some small screen like a 4x6 or 5x7 would probably do nicely for many locations like bedside or bathrooms. These could be quite cheap although judging by PDA's today they could also be quite expensive. I guess one of the best options would be to have no real processing on the board and only send wirelessly the uncompressed audi/video with user inputs sent back to the server for processing. With the data and processes running on the server you might get away with cheaper modules and only slightly more expensive central server. Hmmm.....
Erin told me this idea over dinner at the Gables in Corvallis on Aug 24th, 2003. The basic premis is that people have to buy mulitple fragrances if they want their body wash, perfume and deoderant, etc. to match. Erin thought up this idea that one could sell the makings base of a deoderant (baking soda, etc) and allow the user to make deaoderant, bodywahs etc out of a strong enough perfume. This way, any perfume can have that "matching effect. Erin thought about the question between roll-on deoderant and solids... Since this would be mainly marketed to female consumers, this is a valid question. (No armpit hair to worry about....)
Ah, this is an idea I had sometime during the summer. I was thinkinga about solar cells, hydro power, and wind power. Trying to think of ideas of how we could harness this power for home use. Well I thought it would be neat to have some sort of generators to catch all the rainrun off from gutters. As the water flows by it could generate electricity.
This may not work well because the turbine generators are only efficient when working with large flows of water. But then I thought, there are probably large flows in the sewer/drainage systems. So why not put in mini-hydro plants attached to the storm water runoff systems. There is probably so much water that runs off in a typical city this could really be a neat thing to do. I don't have the skill to calculate this so maybe it's not feasible. But it would be neat to see a study done on this.
Anyway, you might need to build some kind of catch basins or reservoirs to catch the water in so that you can store up a bit of energy.
Finally, on a smaller scale I thought it would be neat to try to store large amounts of water in the rainy season on one's property from roof runoff. If you had a large enough capacity container you could probably be able to water your plants in the dry season with the roof runoff from the wet season. I figured out this would work at my house even on some of the dryest years on record. But I would need somewhere around 3ft of water storage in an area the size of the footprint of my house. Well I do have a large crawl space so if you had some sort of bladders or lots of 50 gal drums you could probably do this. The only problem would then be that with the water underground you'd need pumps to water your plants with.
Well this idea came from my dad. What if instead of a large wind turbine, you could make a whole forest of mini wind turbines that you could for instance put on the roof of your house. If these were efficient they could be used in windy areas without a lot of clearance and with no need for large systems. The group of fans could possibly supplement power and feed back into the system or perhaps charge up batteries or the like. This would also be a good option in places where solar power wouldn't really work and you would also get the benefit of having power produced anytime of day.