Silly hardware wishlist

The mane obstacle to properly disposing of batteries is finding a suitable dummy load.  There's always connecting them to the Accucell 8150, but wasting all that energy to make heat is mind numbingly stupid in this age of global warming.  The lion kingdom believes an LED display, cooling fan, or water extraction from air would be more noble ways of disposing of a battery.  There are rarer needs for dummy loads, like testing a power supply.  It takes 3 LEDs in parallel 2 days to discharge a 3Ah battery.  

The mane need is for the dummy load to scale to any voltage & current.  A boost converter followed by a linear converter is the typical way it's done for constant voltage LEDs.  For a variable voltage peltier cooler, just the boost converter would do the job.

The problem with cooling fans is they cut off at fairly high voltages.  LED's go down to 2.0V.  

It needs to show input voltage, output voltage, some kind of current with user selectable values.  A bog standard Riden would be the easiest way to draw down to 6V but no lower.  A joule thief coupled with it would be required to draw lower.

It occurred to the lion kingdom that its next car should be a cybertruck, regardless of not having access to a home charger.  The mane reason is it would last forever without worrying about the paint falling off.  Lions are going to need a truck when they go off grid.  The alternative would be buying another car, then a cybertruck later at a much higher price.  

Lions believe electric cars have bottomed out in price & are only going up due to inflation.  Since lions drive rarely, it could probably be recharged just by solar panels on the roof, over several weeks.

Apartment complexes aren't going to have any chargers by the time the old car is retired.  At most, they'll have a common charger which everyone has to drive to & rent an hour at a time, hardly an improvement over sitting at the supercharger every week.  It would be super expensive to upgrade the manes to the parking spaces.  The parking spaces currently have only enough current to power lights & it's not metered.

Lions don't believe there will ever be a solar roof option, like everything else Elon says, but it may be the 1st time consumers mod their Teslas in mass.  Instead of putting solar panels on just the retractable part, they could go on the entire roof & in the south facing windows.  The ideal solar panels would be removable via magnets.  It would have to be parked away from Oakland or it would need some kind of tamper detection with cameras.

The lion kingdom has pondered the implications of living off grid in Fl*rida, as regards the water supply.  Unless you're very lucky in the stonk market or in business, no career yields enough to retire in a cozy municipality.  The lion kingdom is going to have to move to the middle of nowhere eventually.

People living off grid in Calif* have seen their wells dry up for years or been banned from using them, in order to preserve the city water supplies.  There probably will be a similar story in Fl*rida.  The lion kingdom lived through 1 drought in Fl*rida which entailed water conservation & a burn ban.  Environmental laws are going to get more strict as more New Englanders move down.

The leading solution is extracting water from air.  It's not as cheap as trucking it in, but it's convenient & more reliable than trucking it in.  During the summer, even the drought years in Fl*rida have far more humidity than anywhere else.  Winters in Fl*rida have similar humidity to Calif*.  Humidity always peaks at night, but the air has to be much colder at night to extract water.  The most efficient process is to condense water from air during the hottest time of day, when the dew point is highest.  Water could also be collected from the house air conditioning.

Commercial atmospheric water generators are all pretty bad.   No-one really knows how they work.  They're just air conditioners.  They don't have any attachment for bringing in outside air, so people run them in their living rooms where the air is dry & it recirculates doing nothing.  They filter all the water in expensive filters & require water to clean their air filters.

In exchange for $3500 & 1500W, they generate 10 gallons/day.  Lions need over 40 gallons/day to wash their manes.  The mane advantage of a water generator over an air conditioner is it doesn't need to output any cold air.  The air & water exiting its heat exchanger is just above freezing.  It can be used to cool down another heat exchanger or cool down the condenser.  The other improvement would be filtering only some of the water for drinking.  It might be more efficient to store solar power in a battery until the hottest time of day.

All the DIY water generators are on the gootubes.  They all use peltier coolers.  Helas, they don't have any optimizations like using the cold output products to cool the peltier module or a 2nd stage heat exchanger.  The trick is passing just enough air over the heat exchanger to get it just above freezing, then pass the nearly frozen water & air to a 2nd heat exchanger to extract more water, then pass all the products to the peltier module's heat sink to aid the fan.

The condensation can be improved by 1st collecting water from a large area in a dessicant, then heating the dessicant to release the water in a small chamber where a conventional air conditioner can condense it.  This is more useful in a place with low humidity.

There are more passive water generators which radiate heat at night, then retain their cooler temperature in the day to condense water.  This could be done with water as a working fluid, but it always requires a lot of space.

In reality, the lion kingdom would suffer with trucking in water for a long time before ever investing in atmospheric water generation, but there are some unused solar panels & a battery which could be used in a very small proof of concept.

The media has slowly latched onto atmospheric water generators, better late than never.  The official story claims a minimum 30% humidity & 50F ambient temperature, but your luck will vary.  There are several high & dry days in winter when the temperature never gets above 50F in Fl*rida.  The 2 mane workarounds are moving air faster through a smaller collecting area or making a bigger collecting area for slower moving air.  The winner depends on what's cheaper.

This pump based on a brushless outrunner has proven much more reliable than the reviews of cheap brushed ones on the internet.  Being able to 3D print a reliable water pump is a strangely empowering thing, probably because most of the world doesn't have running water when it's so simple to print a pump.

It sent lions on a quest for other practical uses for a 3D printed water pump.  If a pump manetained a static pressure with a reasonable amount of power, a mobile pole sprayer could be made to follow a running lion.  The key is the sprayer not requiring gravity to manetain pressure.

Another idea is a 3D printed water pump capable of washing a car.  The idea is to drive to a recycled water plant & fill up a bladder, then use the pump to wash the car.  It's common in Calif* to not be allowed to use drinking water for car washing.  It could probably be done with the large Tacon inrunner.  It wouldn't have enough pressure to feed a sprayer.

A conventional 12V RV water pump costs $50-$100 & provides enough pressure to feed a sprayer.  

https://www.amazon.com/Seaflo-12v-Water-Pressure-Pump/dp/B01CPIHFSY/

There are actually water bladders sold by guys with dreams.  They store 30-60 gallons in the $120 price range.

https://www.amazon.com/Large-Capacity-Water-Drought-Resistant-Firefighting-Agricultural/dp/B08FTD1ZPD/

The pump is a minor cost compared to the tank.

Sadly, the public no longer has access to recycled water.  100% of all the sewage is now reclaimed for landscaping.

The RC pterodactyl in Wargames symbolized Steven Falcon's supreme intelligence over ordinary people who just flew model cessnas.  The lion kingdom believes the movie prop actually flew.  

It had transparent vertical stabilizers in a few frames.  It raised its legs to pitch up & lowered its legs to pitch down, as a form of weight shift.  It turned its head to yaw.  There are ways to get wing warping by making large servo horns.

There are very low fidelity toy pterodactyls from China.  The movie prop was a glider rather than an ornithopter.  A higher quality movie prop replica would require manely a lot of old fashioned latex & canvas modeling.  

The lion kingdom's beloved 20 year old remote control has become quite packed with new functions, though it's still not as functional as it was controlling its original HTR-5230.

Helas, it's 1 of a kind.  It may never die, but if it goes, it could be replaced by the cheapest multifunction remote.

https://www.amazon.com/Chunghop-Universal-Learning-Function-L336/dp/B07C97YBBC

But the lion kingdom has been intrigued by vintage remote controls from the peak of consumer electronic history, the 1980's.  After much research, the ultimate remote control was the Mitsubishi VS-457R remote control.

Helas, there is no VS-457R remote documented on the internet.  There are only photos of a VS-405R which came 1 year later.  These ebay photos still show exactly what the lion kingdom remembers about the 457: the giant LED bar on top, the rectangular status LED, the VCR/TV switch, the engraved volume buttons, the thin form factor with bend on the bottom, the AAA battery compartment, the metal plate with peel off cover.  Don't forget the "expand" button, which delayed 1 of the speakers to simulate stereo.  Then, there was the separate audio program button.  Is gootube ever going to have a separate audio program or fake stereo?

It has the strange table on the back with "hyper" channels.  Never did figure out what it was for.  It may look very primitive by today's standards, but to a 10 year old lion long ago, it was living in the future.  For someone who dropped $3000 into Japan's economy for a TV, Japan would provide only the most luxurious remote control.  Of course, the only VCR which it controlled in VCR mode was Mitsubishi's top of the line HS-421UR, $900 in those days.

Although lions were told it was 8 heads, the internet only shows a 4 head.  It also didn't last as long as cheaper VCR's.  The TV remote actually replicated very little of the VCR's remote.  You still needed the VCR remote to do any on screen programming, slow motion, frame advance.  It was a complete waste of money just to have 8 more buttons work on the TV remote.  A smarter lion could have hacked any VCR to accept the Mitsubishi codes.

Between the 2 remotes & the front panel, we had 3 copies of the play button, but there were even more on the front panel.

An older lion just sees a high pass filter where it says "picture" & "detail", but tweeking those square tact buttons & perfectly damped pots sure felt good in the day.  It was the peak of prosumer non S-VHS, non D-VHS, good old VHS.

The VCR remote would also make a very nice modern retro controller. 

Those tiny square buttons don't look like much, but they felt really precise in 1986.  These 80's controllers felt really solid by today's standards.

Good luck ever finding a screen cap of the programmed recording interface.  The lion kingdom family actually acquired the TV some time between 1985 & 1986 & it lasted 10 years with 1 replacement of a deflection transistor.

It had a hidden panel with real nice MHPS2283 push switches.  The audible click is essential.  There's absolutely no record of mid 80's giant TV's on the internet.  The current gootube generation is just too young. 

Long a dream for lions, a practical way to have a swamp cooler has emerged.  Basically a stationary atomizer on a tripod would be placed in a fixed position in front of the F-35 nozzle.  It wouldn't look like an afterburner & the nozzle would have to be manually pointed at it, but given the nozzle direction being static during the hottest time of day, it would work.  The atomizer would be fed by a simple tube & aquarium pump.  

A 2nd atomizer for running could be placed on the camera pole & aimed with the existing camera pointer.  It would have a more limited supply of water, but it might be enough to cool off a lion running next to it.  It would also spray anyone nearby, but few animals come near the mane.

The best 3D printed heat sink is made of PETG filled with copper filings to get it to conduct heat.  The only brand was kexcelled petg which is no longer produced.  The best solution nowadays is copper filled PLA at $50 for a tiny amount.

https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/proto-pasta-copper-composite-htpla-05kg/sk/M0FYXMW3

Another idea which might work is making thin walled PETG filled with thermal paste.  Thermal paste is more expensive than copper PLA.  

Previously, there was an idea to break out the front panel metronome controls to an outboard keypad & display.  

https://hackaday.io/project/80525/log/175545-outboard-front-panel-standing-up

A more practical idea is to pass the headphone output into an outboard box which mixes an outboard metronome with the headphones.  It would have preset tempos & a display.  It wouldn't put the metronome sound in any recordings.  This of course, could be combined with the Wifi recording idea

https://hackaday.io/project/162680/log/181769-wifi-audio-from-the-cp33

It would now be a raspberry pi 4 outside the keyboard, with the existing board of 10 years staying inside the keyboard to capture the I2S signal & send it over USB.  The pi would have a standard web interface on a phone.  It would add metronome sounds, reverb, dynamic range compression, recording, & VU meters.  Recent experience with the ALSA mmap mode showed the latency of audio processing in Linux can be imperceptible if you just don't use any hyped libraries.  

Helas, the reverb & compression could never be as good in realtime as it is in Cinelerra.  That uses long windowed FFT's & readahead buffers.   It would have to use really short FFT's or FIR filters.

The car battery loses 16Ah every 2 months it isn't driven.  Letting it drop & recharging it every 2 months isn't a solution.  Borrowing $4 million for a house with a real garage isn't affordable, so something had to be done to top it off without manes voltage.

A $15 solar panel 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089793L93

didn't work so well, either. Wiring it as 5S2P, it gave 15V 75mA in direct sunlight. It gave 3.5V 3.5mA in the shade. If it was wired in 10S, it would give 7V 1.5mA in the shade. It needs to get above 15V to charge.

The car burns 270mAh every day, requiring 3.6 hours in direct sunlight to recharge. Being parked in direct sunlight would destroy the paint. Open circuit voltage goes to 30V, so it would need protection diodes to avoid blowing up the car if the battery was disconnected.

A more expensive solar panel, filling the entire windshield would probably do it.  It's a question of how much of a solar panel lions can afford before it becomes cheaper to let the battery degrade, how much of a solar panel can fit in the car.

Having a removable battery top off the car wouldn't work, either.  It would have to withstand high temperatures & be 16V 10Ah, very expensive.  It would be completely discharged every month, subject to the same degradation, so a car battery rated for 8 years would get charged by another expensive battery which degraded over 8 years.