Silly hardware wishlist

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Better bluetooth speaker
lion mclionhead • 09/18/2024 at 18:34 • 0 comments

Something which is worth just about nothing is the humble bluetooth speaker. Lions have long struggled with bluetooth speakers. There's a compromise between size, weight, & sound quality. The best one in lion opinion was the Auvio mini. It had the best compromises. Its mane problem was electronicals burning out. 1st its amplifier burned out & then it had some kind of firmware corruption.

The 808 Canz 2 had good sound quality but was a brick.

The best one now might be the Anker soundcore mini. Its sound quality is the worst & it's heavy, but it's the only thing currently made & it's just light enough. It has better bass but is very quiet & its passive radiator breaks after 3 years. It can be somewhat bodged with an extra op-amp & a lot of noise. It has the most user serviceable parts. The driver is screw mounted & removable.

The electronicals have mercifully remaned reasonably discrete & hackable. You can normally hack them to take external 5V & automatically power up.

Lions have burned over $100 on bluetooth speakers & invested a lot of effort in making them more useable but designing a permanent one with better compromises has always been a low priority. It's always cheaper to buy another one when they break. The soundcore driver in a sealed enclosure with the brain of the 808 Canz 2 is the leading candidate.

There are also drivers suitable for a rectangular speaker. Research into bass ports & passive radiators shows they would not offer a useful compromise between weight & sound quality. It might be smart to shape the speaker into a teardrop to get a bigger cavity. For something as old & low bandwidth as speakers, they're very complicated & poorly understood.
Humanoid robot art performers
lion mclionhead • 09/03/2024 at 01:16 • 0 comments

Humanoid robots are a big thing again. The last time was the robosapein craze 20 years ago. There seems to be a pattern of image recognition craze, AI craze, & robot craze on repeat every 20 years. What would attract lions to humanoid robots, having never been fans of humans or robots with no purpose?

Nefarious poses involving 2 humanoid robots hold special interest for lions. Gender identity of the robots would be hard. Recycling barbie dolls might help.
Spinning fly swatter
lion mclionhead • 08/31/2024 at 22:31 • 0 comments

Don't know why China didn't already invent this, but a spinning fly swatter would be a win. They do market a fly repeller, but it sounds pretty useless.
Fleet oiler model
lion mclionhead • 08/15/2024 at 22:21 • 0 comments

Watching Szimanski's growing collection of 3D printed models made lions ponder the idea of a fleet oiler model more. It started out as a preposterious passing idea. If it had cutaways or removable panels, it might be more entertaining. They weren't battleships but did have 5" guns. Szimanski took posession of a 5" gun model.

There's a book on fleet oilers which could be made into a movie

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/GSBO/index.html
Ice body cooling suit
lion mclionhead • 06/21/2024 at 21:48 • 0 comments

This giant ice pack has proven pretty useless over the last 15 years. It was for transporting lipos in hot weather but the problems with it are heat not transferring to it, inefficient use of space, deforming into an inefficient shape when frozen. It has never been used very effectively. Lions have used smaller ice packs very effectively for GPU cooling, since a GPU normally goes full speed for only a short time every day. The big ice pack would only be useful in large quantities, in a gigantic cooler.

So the question was what to do with it besides sending it to chinese landfill. The leading idea is some kind of suit for an animal to wear. It would circulate water around the ice pack, then in water pipes around the animal. It would be pretty heavy to carry around, with the water pump & battery. It could work if the animal was stationary. Another problem is peristalsis pumps wear out & start leaking.

Another idea might be an ice powered air conditioner. Its shape is still the least efficient for heat transfer. It could be melted & the fluid transferred to some smaller containers but FDM structures are not water tight. Any other structure is more expensive than pre-filled ice packs. There are pre filled ice sticks. It's 1 of those things which intuitively could serve a purpose one day but never has & it takes $1000 in real estate.

A big application would be a body suit worn in an un airconditioned apartment. Cooling just an arm or neck would be a big win. It would be like a neck pillow but a simple tube that connected on 1 side & made a bunch of U turns on each side, crossing behind the neck before returning on the entry side.

Another idea is an ice cooled mouse pad. This too would involve a heat transfer from a big ice box to a thin surface.

Holding or resting the pack on the chest alone is a pretty good source of cooling when standing at a desk, but not every efficient. The most efficient way to cool down is spraying water around the neck. The ice pack on the chest could be a passive way to cool down while sleeping.
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A few experiments in hot weather showed it cools a lion for 1 hour & it not as effective for the amount of energy used to freeze it as spraying water. It'll eventually be poured into a used salad container to document the innards & sent to chinese landfill.
Home made MRE
lion mclionhead • 04/07/2024 at 09:23 • 1 comment

Lions were sort of intrigued by MRE's for long runs but they were nosebleed $15 before Bide, now $18. The fact is they're just an aggregation of cheap foods way below $18 & 1 heated mane course. All the value is in the heating element & of course the branding. So lions figure they'll never eat a real MRE but might create one if they can just obtain a standalone heating element. The robot would carry the food & water. Where lions live now, no running involving a robot ever goes very far from food cheaper than an MRE. Where lions are going to live, there isn't going to be cheap food near the robot accessible paths. The big need now is food during a 100 mile loop course.

https://www.amazon.com/MRE-Flameless-Heater-Pack-12/dp/B00KI3MC6O

https://www.ozarkoutdoorz.com/products/mre-flameless-heater-pack-of-12

https://afsurplus.com/products/mre-heater-pack-of-10

There are heaters scavenged from expired MRE's & some claiming to be new. All you have to do is add water to the heater, put the heater in a noodle bowl & let it cook. Lions have trouble digesting noodles while running though.

https://www.amazon.com/MRE-Beef-Chicken-Entrees-Combo/dp/B01IC401J0

There are also standalone mane courses scavenged from expired MRE's. These have no heaters. As with all Bezos goods, they're only in bulk now.

https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-House-Stroganoff-Backpacking-Servings/dp/B084PD55JY

The winning strategy seems to be an MRE heater with purpose made camping food. That's going to be a lot more compact & faster than a gas stove. Camping food is still ridiculously expensive but not as bad as a real MRE. It's probably going to be just as expensive to create freeze dried food as buy it.
Line following biped
lion mclionhead • 03/28/2024 at 22:58 • 0 comments

The only line followers are wheeled robots. They don't put machine vision in biped toys. It might be an interesting variant on the line following concept to have a biped. Even better would be a biped running robot. There aren't any running biped robots, big or small. They're all quadrupeds. Not sure why this is. They obviously have the actuator speed. The closest things are single leg pogo robots. They have to jump to move, regardless of speed.
Sand drawing robot
lion mclionhead • 03/23/2024 at 01:10 • 0 comments

Along the lines of the smallest possible RC toy
https://hackaday.io/project/162680/log/226525-smallest-possible-rc-toy
autonomous things
https://hackaday.io/project/162680/log/213989-autonomous-thing-which-travels-back-forth
Japan's lunar excursion vehicle
https://global.jaxa.jp/activity/pr/jaxas/no088/03.html
& a sand garden robot
Comes an idea for a portable sand drawing robot based on the lunar excursion vehicle.
It can certainly draw lines. The problem with this is doing a pen up. Maybe it needs a quad copter component. Maybe it can convert into a rolling ball.
Tethered gas balloon platform
lion mclionhead • 03/01/2024 at 06:38 • 0 comments

A tethered balloon would make a good temporary observation point for rocket launches. If the tether breaks, you're in a tough spot though. It would need a deflation valve.
The practical version would be unmanned & have a high resolution camera. It would have 3-4 tethers to keep it reasonably stationary. It could capture sound without the noise of a quad copter.
Another idea is using the platform to launch gliders.
Smallest possible RC toy
lion mclionhead • 01/06/2024 at 21:32 • 0 comments

The lion kingdom discovered RC with a zip zap micro toy someone brought into the day job. It could almost go the length of a hallway on a charge, some 350ft based on a goog earth photo of the building. It was quite addictive to discover how far something that small could be made to go. Then came the even more addictive picco Z in 2006. The addiction to that was from achieving the most stable flight with the least controls.

Something about the micro toys seemed addictive in ways none of the larger vehicles were. It might have been trying to get the maximum ratio of range to size. Lions just outgrew the toy problem & transitioned to using RC parts to solve bigger problems after 2006. Then there was a home made toy that was self propelled but not RC.

The whole thing got lions pondering what the smallest possible RC thing would be. Below a certain size, wheels aren't practical & solenoid driven jumping becomes more practical. Habayusa 2 used hopping rovers. It takes lions back to the photovore craze. The minimum system would be a big solenoid actuator & a weight shift mechanism.

The free flight craze came along & revealed the minimum solenoid actuator. There was no practical linear actuator. 3D printing made these infinitely easier to make. There could be 2 rotating actuators forming a linear motion but it would be big.

Suspect the material that it travels on is just going to be limited by the size & it's just going to be 2 big solenoid plungers for motion, a battery, & a brain.

It's a pretty tough problem, since you're trying to create the most reaction force in the smallest space. Early biological machines used thousands of hairs.

https://www.newsdirectory3.com/japans-first-lunar-rover-to-be-sold-to-the-public/

This might be the smallest moving thing currently made.

It's got the full phone app, camera, collapsing ability but something that just drives around could be a couple pager motors. A good old commutator is still smaller than a solid state motor controller.