Silly hardware wishlist

Some notes on the protocol used by the $30 desk controller.

https://embedded-elixir.com/post/2019-01-18-nerves-at-home-desk-controller/

https://github.com/eyadid/uplift-wifi/blob/master/ESP8266-Lua/init.lua

It's a standard user interface JCHT35K & a standard motor controller JCB35N

Much like the remote controlled GU-24 lightbulb, it's not a huge need.  It would be nice to have preset heights without paying for a controller.  The mane need is replacing the membrane buttons with better buttons on a remote control, in addition to presets.  Those membrane buttons are simply awful.  The remote control would have to be wired to have a decent response time.  

The trick is he didn't reverse engineer any of the commands sent for presets.  It seems the desk writes a constant stream of height codes to a UART.  There could be a preset program that just reads the height codes for feedback.  It couldn't have any proportional feedback.

The lion kingdom formerly got really high efficiency from powered, controlled monocopters.  They approached fixed wing efficiency.  Their efficiency can be much higher than helicopters & quad copters because less mass is wasted on a slowly moving inner wing.

An idea popped in of an unpowered monocopter glider.  The fundamental problem is achieving the glide ratio of a fixed wing glider while flying in a tight circle.  It could be launched into the wind & flown to thermals.  

Efficient monocopters require a very long wing with slow RPM.  The wing would have to be a folding structure & maybe even a novel parachute.  Then there's the problem of motivating the wing to spin without a motor.  Plants manage to do it by falling, but falling is really just flying through an updraft.

Monocopters are susceptible to not knowing their orientation when banked steeply.  The kind of wind required to ascend would require some steep banking.  Lions have long fought this problem.  It basically needs another heading reference to back up magnetic north.  Some kind of directional radio might be the only way.

The STM32's always supported oversampling of their UARTs, either 16x or 8x depending on baud rate.  The lion kingdom never connected them directly to a radio, so that never saw any use.  Now they're a thing of the past.

Lions always connect radios to PICs, but PICs don't have UART oversampling.  They could do software oversampling with a low baud rate.  It could be a cheap way to get longer range.  Lora in comparison uses a frequency sweeping pulse to get longer range.

The swamp cooler worked well enough with diluted perfume to consider a single tank, single emitter version.  This would have an ultrasonic sensor to detect water level & automatically shut off.  This would replace incense & free up some room.  Unfortunately, it wouldn't be usable in winter.  The stock nano misters go for 7 minutes per tank.  Some of them have automatic shutoff.  45 minutes would be ideal.

1 idea was creating a shelf for the existing desk contents to free some space.  In place of the stuff, 2 blowers go behind the monitor & feed 2 adjustable vents behind the keyboard.  A proof of concept could involve cardboard ducts, 3D printing just the vents, & the still unused Nidec blowers.  The problem is moving the vents when it's time to feed the mane.

The leading idea is now a Tesla style vent attached to the monitor.  The blower would possibly also be attached to the monitor.

So there was this program

https://gyroflow.xyz/

A program designed to do off camera stabilization of video with any gyro metadata.  The mane advantage for gopros with this is it can look farther ahead at higher resolution than the camera can with its own memory.  A 60fps or a 2.7k video could get a lot more stabilization.  If stabilization is done offline, the HDMI from the camera won't lag.  HDMI could be used for object tracking.  The neural network would have to be retrained for the lower camera angle.

The other thing this enables is making timelapses from video.  The gopro can't convert a video into a timelapse.

The mane disadvantage is it doesn't have access to the full sensor area like the hardware does, so the video is either going to be cropped again or have black borders.  There's no way to export the overscanning area from the gopro 7.  It exports the same cropped area for stabilized & unstabilized modes.  

There is the possibility of capturing gyro data on a home made board & using it to stabilize a camera with no stabilization.  The lion kingdom's Gear 360 could be hacked back to life.  The key is synchronizing the gyro data.  The way they do it is by matching the gyro data in a spreadsheet with motion vectors in the video.  

Guys record a video on an action cam which also records gyro data or they record the flight control data in their quad copter.  The video from the action cam isn't used for synchronization.

A hacked Gear 360 could do lion tracking & timelapse off line.  The mane problem is it's heavier.  Although gyroflow supports cameras with the word 360, it doesn't support the 2 lens cameras that were popular 5 years ago.  For animals with a lot of money, Insta360 has replaced gopro in the small form factor market but only the single lens cameras are supported.  

There are many IMU data loggers, all large & expensive.  There's a general purpose, expensive data logging board

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2795

That has battery charging, USB, & an SD card.  It's not the most compact but solves all the problems.

The easiest logging with spare parts would be on an AT90USB Key from 15 years ago with 16MB of flash.  That could also do solar power logging.

There's a 200Mhz gumstix basix 400 with a ripped off SD card port & 8 MB of flash.  

Another 600Mhz gumstix has 32MB of flash.

The day job board has 128MB of flash & runs at 1.3Ghz.  It has very few GPIOs.

Any board needs 3MB of flash to record 1 hour of IMU data, 2 GPIOs for I2C, a GPIO for a status LED, a GPIO for a start switch, USB to access the data like a filesystem.

For mounting the IMU recorder on the camera, the best solution is the smallest custom board possible.  There are some easily solderable flashes with 128MB. 

1 Gigabit NAND

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/micron-technology-inc/MT29F1G01ABAFDSF-AAT-F-TR/6135560

A lion 20 years ago might have made a custom board, but the need for battery management, USB, flash, make the adafruit board the most direct solution.  The battery & USB connectors are going to be bigger than the board if they're bodged on.  

Since no board is going to be small enough to mount on top of the camera pole, it might as well be the AT90USB key with the IMU on the end of long magnet wires.  The lion kingdom doesn't see a time it would ever be used with a gopro because of the cropping problem.  It would be exclusively for the gear 360.

So after burning $15 on a watt meter, the 22 year old 2.5hp Craftsman came in at >1150W starting & 900W constant power.  The internet may differ in opinion, but $100 inverters these days are rated for 2KW peak & 1KW constant power.  

https://www.harborfreight.com/1000-watt-continuous2000-watt-peak-modified-sine-wave-power-inverter-63522.html

There's also a 1.5KW/ 3KW peak one.

https://www.harborfreight.com/1500-watt-continuous3000-watt-peak-modified-sine-wave-power-inverter-63432.html

The mane problem is $100 of LIPO would provide 1kW for 14 minutes of vacuuming before the batteries were destroyed.

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-5000mah-3s-20c-lipo-pack-w-xt-90.html

$100 of deep cycle lead acid would last 1.4 hours, but this would take up the entire apartment just to do 1 thing.  

https://www.walmart.com/ip/EverStart-Lead-Acid-Marine-RV-Deep-Cycle-Battery-Group-Size-29DC-12V-845-MCA/20531543

This is still cheaper than what a gasoline generator would cost.  Gasoline generators don't have a peak & constant power.  2KW from gasoline is $600.

It seems the biggest inverters are intended to be powered directly from car battery terminals while running the car.  There isn't a cost effective way to power them from standalone batteries.  The vacuum would only be used for cleaning the car & the carbon monoxide fumes would help to loosen dirt.  

The lion kingdom needs to get serious about a backup water supply.  For animals making less than $500,000 in Calif*, water is unavailable 5 days/year.  The unreliable water is more noticeable when working from home.  For the last 20 years, lions have relied on disposable 2.5 gallon things for washing & bottled water for drinking.  The 2.5 gallon things taste horrible.  The mane problem is they have to be pierced to let air in & then thrown away once pierced.  In the 40 years that these have been made, they've never had a 2nd watertight valve for letting air in, but they're cheap.

When stuff like this becomes reusable, it gets a lot more expensive than the amount of extra value.  A compressible bladder is a lot more attractive for a $5 million micro apartment since it can be filled on demand from where water exists instead of permanently taking up space.  They get either expensive or not collapsible in the 3 gallon size.

After reading about Wilson audio for 25 years, the lion kingdom realized if it had unlimited money it would try to make replicas of the world's most ridiculous speakers.

The flagship is currently the WAMM master chronosonic at over $1/3 million.  It's really marketing wank wording & graphic design, but what graphical design it is.  The mane challenge is such large cases can't be 3D printed.  Swanky case designs get a lot harder when 3D printing is taken out of the equation.  It would have to be made of wood.  The french baroque case would be replaced by something simpler & more functional.

The general idea is low profile, aimable air vents blowing up from desk level are the only way a standing desk is going to be practical.  There's not enough room next to a modern 4k monitor for any fans.  

So the idea came of somehow fixing 2 blower vents or a big row of vents to the sides or top of a keyboard to get more airflow during the summer.  Unlike existing USB fans which hardly move any air, this idea would attach to a big blower somewhere else via a vacuum hose.  The air would be blowing up from under the monitor.  It might be enough to justify going to a more compact dome keyboard instead of the "mechanical" keyboard of the last 4 years.  

The journey begins with shrinking the keyboard.  The mechanical keyboard really wasn't as satisfying as the internet claimed, despite conforming to the lion kingdom's favorite keyboard, the model M clones of the HP 9000.