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• Mega bass

  lion mclionhead • 03/08/2026 at 07:47 • 0 comments

  Mega bass was a beloved capability for 10 years of lion history, which in those days was half their lifespan.  It's been lost for 26 years now.  Lions last used that walkman as a radio in 1998-1999.  It quickly gave way to shoutcasts, mp3 downloads, & TV  in those days.  Mega bass gave way to whatever crummy EQ was inside a soundblaster sound card.  Then that went away.  

  Most of the music lions now hear comes from home made amplifiers with a baxandall circuit.  Some comes from a bluetooth speaker with no EQ.  Nothing has sounded as good as the original mega bass from the late 80's.  The circuit could be harvested from the original walkman, but it would entail another battle against noise.  It would mean losing the radio in that walkman & the whole thing would probably disintegrate.  The tape deck has been long gone.  Lions would have no more radio besides the car.  Other radios have been scrapped in the interest of buying a chip radio if the need ever arose.  The walkman radio was somewhat special because of its presets & its LCD, but it was pretty awful anyway.

  The mega bass switch was actually very flaky.  Young lion managed to buy it time by warping it with pliers.

  Lions would now consider scavenging the mega bass circuit & going with an SDR radio.  The original walkman would otherwise have no use besides a museum piece.  It cost so much money in those days, it makes lions reload their accounts to actually believe those days are over.

• Furball robot

  lion mclionhead • 02/24/2026 at 20:22 • 0 comments

  
  
  

  Watching Dark Crystal got lions pondering if such a dog creature could be realized as a sphere robot covered in fur.  It could have an actuated mouth & eyes.  The movie creature got around both by slowly walking on 2 tiny legs & by rolling to go fast.  The legs could be used for jumping.

  Still at a loss for any practical use.  It probably would be a windfall as a mass produced AI toy.  The fur would have to be a removable sock, which would make eyes, mouth, nose, & legs difficult.  Everyone wanted a hacky sack 40 years ago.  A fur sack that rolled via single paw controller could be a souped up hacky sack.  Another thing everyone had was a furry pencil eraser.

  A rolling fur ball wouldn't last long.  A durable fur robot definitely needs feet.  There were efforts in 3D printed fur, before all investment shifted to AI.  The closest thing to structural hair might be 3D printed snakes.

  https://thangs.com/designer/ruvenbals
  

   There is a collection of sliding mechanisms which resemble large scale hairs.  The motion would have to be rotational instead of linear.

  Stylized spaghetti hairs made of TPE might be durable.  This could be a practical application of sideways printing, a 1mm nozzle.

  It could roll on standoffs on the top side of the fur while the feet extended on the bottom side.

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  For all the dreams of a practical replica of the movie prop's motion & modern humanoid hype, physics dictate a conventional 3 wheeled base with an actuated muppet on top.  There are very low quality replicas of the fur ball under fizzgig search terms.

• Paramotors, boats with lion figurines

  lion mclionhead • 10/22/2025 at 02:00 • 0 comments

  There are categories of models in which human figures are a necessary component of the steering, but they're not really representing all animals.  To this day, China still doesn't make any model with a lion figurine.  The idea kicked off with the idea of an RC paddleboard with a lion figurine.  China doesn't make RC paddleboards at all.  It would be quite a kinematic challenge to make a paddling lion, with all the arm movements & side switching.  Then it would have to be waterproof.  It could be purely powered by a propeller.

  A lion paramotor would be an easier matter of just linear arm movements.  

  Gemini 3.1 pro did a better job than other models.  Goog is just going to steamroll over everyone else because of their privileged access to the world's data & their massive real estate holdings.

  The lion kingdom never got anywhere towards a pterodactyl glider.  This idea seems doomed because pterodactyls are so unoptimized for flying.
  

• Vintage keyboard conversion

  lion mclionhead • 09/16/2025 at 07:40 • 0 comments

  A totally random idea was to convert some vintage keyboard, more attainable than a model M & more durable than the failed laptop keyboard, to USB.  This is not as easy as the internet claims, because simultaneous keypresses & sleep states have many corner cases.
  

  The commodore 64, Apple IIgs, trs-80 portable had the most memorable keyboards.  Besides taking up unnecessary space, they could have the feel lions want.  The missing keys could go in a breakout board.
  

• Portable S-video recorder

  lion mclionhead • 08/15/2025 at 18:49 • 0 comments

  Hi8 always looked so glorious on s-video passthrough but so terrible on tape, even compared to DV, lions have pondered a portable s-video recorder for it.  It would involve a raspberry pi, USB s-video dongle, 320x240 LCD, LCD driver, & possibly USB audio capture.  There's just the 1 Hi8 camcorder in the apartment.  It can show a clean video feed.  There would be no purpose other than showing what could have been.

  Another portable recorder desire has long been for climbing to mountain tops to capture digital TV from sutro tower.  If lions had $50k for rent, digital TV would still be part of their lives.  The only way to affordably get it is to camp out on mountain tops.
  

  The 2 applications could be combined into something with either a 320x240 LCD or phone app & raspberry pi.  The mane disadvantage to using phones as interfaces has been the wifi configuration, but they've overall outweighed dedicated LCD's.
  

  There are undoubtedly analog video & DVB capturing solutions for phones, for a price.
  

• Programmable inverter

  lion mclionhead • 07/25/2025 at 04:40 • 0 comments

  Programmable inverters are a small fortune.  This one is $2800.  A minimal, programmable inverter could be quite useful in adjusting fan speeds & remotely controlling fan speed.  Current can be limited by feeding it from a cheap DC supply.
  

  Lions previously experimented with common car inverters.  Cheap ones convert an input DC voltage directly to a 10x output AC voltage with no regulator.  They have a min & max voltage sensor which shuts them down.  This could probably be bypassed to make a fully programmable output voltage when combined with a cheap DC source.  Changing the frequency would be harder.
  

  The next step would be developing a sine wave generator from a microcontroller & H bridge.  It could probably be done by putting a different brain in a stock inverter.
  

  It wouldn't be as cheap as a USB charger.  It would entail a USB-C deal to get 5-19V DC.  Then that would go to a buck converter to fine tune the voltage & limit the DC current.  Lions only need output voltages below 120V at 60Hz so it probably just needs to bypass the voltage limit in a cheap inverter. 
  

• Self supported laser

  lion mclionhead • 07/15/2025 at 08:56 • 0 comments

  https://hackaday.io/project/192386-mini-flashlight

  The self supporting flashlight has worked well enough since its inception 2 years ago that lions have pondered a self supported laser.  Not sure what purpose it would serve.  Younger lion used lasers for sensing robot position & drawing in long exposures.  They can light up diffuse pieces of plastic.  Sometimes, you just need a laser to point at something.  Maybe it could blind spiders.  40 years ago, a younger lion wanted to see if objects in a room were moving on their own.  A self supported laser could mark a starting location.
  

• Star blazers seat

  lion mclionhead • 06/16/2025 at 07:26 • 0 comments

  The seats were the 1st things lions noticed, 45 years ago.  Those were real beasts.  They looked hard but must have been cushioned for the long hours at the console, staring at intergalactic space.  It would need a bigger apartment & it would have to be based on an existing seat.  A good modern seat costs $1000.
  

• Home made LCR meter

  lion mclionhead • 06/14/2025 at 07:17 • 0 comments

  Lions have long dreamed of being able to measure their bags of nH scale inductors, pF scale capacitors,  & sub 10R resistors.  They're almost free but take 2 weeks to mail order. All the multimeters fall over in that range. 
  

  The low effort enclosure in this video reminded lions of the idea of a scratch built LCR meter.   There's so much emphasis on only using commercial meters nowadays, it's manely forgotten that these things can be made from scratch.  Low cost LCR meters don't seem any better than what lions already have.
  

  The Mastech does 1mH to 20H, 1nF to 20uF  The Fluke can go from 1nF to 10,000uF but has no inductance.  It falls over below 10R.  Ideally, something could go from 1nH & 1pF to 100,000uF.  The problem becomes finding room to store the larger capacitors.  It's not known if the extreme ranges require 4 wires.
  

  Auto ranging LCD would be the easiest way to do it with spare parts.  It could be quite expensive when all the ranges of the front end are factored in.

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  The other tool lions could use is a signal generator.

• Analog drum

  lion mclionhead • 05/09/2025 at 22:22 • 0 comments

  A simple analog drum has become a curiosity.  The fascination for analog synthesizer fans must be the feeling of creating original sound instead of replaying recorded sounds.

  Moritz Klein posted the drum machine videos.  

  A realistic piano would be impractical to synthesize in analog but drums are a good match for analog electronicals.  There is still hope an AI model could synthesize a piano from raw physics instead of replaying samples.
  

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