Silly hardware wishlist

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.