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Adversarial photopoppers & humanoid avatars
lion mclionhead • 04/10/2025 at 18:33 • 0 comments

The ongoing saga of finding a use for a photopopper turned to some kind of game where 1 photopopper would search for the other one, in addition to light. They would continuously hunt each other around a room. Realistically, they would end up just meeting up & stopping. An element of randomness would be needed. Maybe it could be some kind of moving art piece. How would nefarious poses be integrated in adversarial photopoppers?

Maybe they could alternate between seeking light, seeking the enemy & avoiding the enemy. A photovore has 3 needs: logistics, offense & defense.

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Then lions started pondering what happened to our future of avatar interfaces.

A humanoid robot would be a good application of the animal machine interfaces depicted 20 years ago, but nothing like that is being pursued during the humanoid robot craze. Instead, the industry wants all control to be from writing prompts.

A seamless connection from an animal to a machine still gives lions more joy than writing prompts.
LCD light pen
lion mclionhead • 04/07/2025 at 04:31 • 0 comments

A totally random idea which has perplexed lions is how to make a light pen for an LCD. The closest analog to the 1980's design is to display a color swatch & have a single pixel sensor which detects movement from the hue. The functional graphics would have to be monochrome. It's unlikely a color swatch would be precise enough to be large enough to detect fast motion. It would have to be small & detect very slow motion.
A more practical way is to have a camera in the light pen. It would need a really close focus to work right against the display. The pen could have a standoff to keep the camera a minimum distance from the display. Then it could detect a crosshair which changed colors in a known pattern to separate itself from the background. The crosshair would move until it was centered in the pen cam.
Smart TV's might already use a camera tracked crosshair to achieve a long range pointing device. They definitely used IMU's long ago.
The big problem is LCD's have a plastic cover while CRT's had glass. They would most likely need some kind of protective cover or the pen would have to be focused to a certain distance.
The only practical use for this might be a better pointing device for the music notation display. It might improve paw writing on that display & shrink the size of the pointing device. It's definitely going back to a time when you had to acquire a crosshair for every pointing operation.
Paramotor monocopter
lion mclionhead • 04/02/2025 at 00:57 • 0 comments

An idea that popped in was a paramotor monocopter. The mane problem it would solve is the storage of a large wing. It might not be as efficient as a rigid wing so it's not going to glide. The trick with paramotor models is they traditionally required action figures of the pilot.

Then the algorithm recommended this thing. It seems to use just throttle & weight shift.

To make a monocopter, it would just need a trimmed weight shift to fly in circles. Maybe further optimization could involve making the parachute wider on the outer diameter of the circle. As far as efficiency, it might be more efficient than a rigid wing because parachutes don't need landing gear. The question of whether a hovering parachute device is more efficient than a hovering rigid wing requires experimentation.
Analog barometer
lion mclionhead • 04/01/2025 at 19:18 • 0 comments

There is a growing desire to add a barometer to the weather wall but $2500 this year doesn't rent a very large wall. The 2nd problem is a barometer would need 4 digits. It would be the most tedious & expensive digital display. Air pressure is the last data which could be sensed locally in the modern age of multifamily housing. Rain gauge, wind direction, like outside temperature, would have to come from wunderground. There are ways to rent an allotment, but it requires growing something in addition to having weather sensors.
The space situation & cost of 4 digits led to an idea for an analog barometer with a digital back end. It would use a simple boundary sensor & gear motor. No small analog display is going to be as accurate as a large digital display.
It could be a large art piece like this clock. Another idea is having whole inches & fractional inches as separate needles with LED markers of course.
A 4 digit display wouldn't need all 28 segments. Air pressure in the apartment only goes from 28-30. 1 digit needs to draw 2 & 3 with 2 variable segments. 1 digit needs to draw 8,9,0 with 2 variable segments. It would need only 18 variable segments while the 12 hour clock needed 25. FL would be a similar story, despite more extreme storms.
methane sensor
lion mclionhead • 01/22/2025 at 06:22 • 0 comments

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/soldered-electronics/333104/21720385

There's been a lot of talk about fires & exploding houses. When nature calls, it would be nice to know when methane levels in the room are hitting dangerous levels. It would also allow the level of CH4 produced by different foods to be quantified.

These sensors need 24 hours to preheat & burn 750 mW. They're no good for portable applications in a vehicle.

Testing it would entail eating cheese, beans, whey, biscuts. Lions are guaranteed to produce methane from cheese.

The trick is it would have to be on the ceiling. It requires a fiddly calibration.
Friction based cord lock
lion mclionhead • 01/18/2025 at 00:27 • 0 comments

Disappointment with spring loaded cord locks got lions thinking more about a friction based cord lock. Previous ideas centered on passing string through a TPU cylinder that was welded closed. It would provide enough compression to keep the string in place while still allowing it to move with enough force.

The problem with spring loaded cord locks is they don't provide enough grip. They might as well not have a spring for the amount of grip. It's normally not necessary to release the spring.

With a friction system, it wouldn't be possible to take the string out & reinsert it. For these temporary applications, there could be a larger device. The smallest device would be for clothing & sandals, so it could possibly be permanent. The temporary design could be a larger thing which permanently attached to 1 end of the string & created temporary friction in the other end of the string.
Onyx PC case
lion mclionhead • 01/02/2025 at 03:24 • 0 comments

The best PC case ever made was obviously the deskside Onyx. There are no exact dimensions for it. Space was a lot cheaper in 1995. Lions still imagine someday having enough space. The complete case had a pyramid going all around the base.
https://www.instructables.com/Convert-a-Silicon-Graphics-Server-into-a-Fridge/
A complete base can barely be seen in a refrigerator hack.
It's unlikely anyone would scrap a vintage SGI to turn it into a refrigerator, nowadays. The fridge hack was done in 2000-2004. That was a time when many animals lost a lot of money in tech stonks & were burned out from go fever, so gutting defunct dot com servers was the thing to do.

1 hit showed 24" L, 20" W, 26.5" H

It's certainly plausible. Sadly, what the internet eventually showed matched none of what young lion remembered of it. The original memory of it was a wider puck with rounder corners & a distinct grey upper band. It's possible young lion saw a prototype, but realistically, the memory of it was just poor.

The memory of the monitor was accurate. It was a strangely primitive, curved shadowmask for the futurism of the puck.
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.