Silly hardware wishlist

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.

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 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.