Silly hardware wishlist

Reviewing the 

https://frame.work/

modular laptop, it's not much different than the others, very small screen, very bulky, no stated battery life but it's probably awful.  There was also the raspberry pi laptop, the OLPC laptop, the netbook revolution.  Laptops just can't be every high performing unless they're designed as 1 piece.

Lions believe the ideal way to get a modular laptop is a bare screen & keyboard with no computing in the lap part.  The CPU, RAM & storage would be a separate brick which would fit in a backpack or a pocket.  Maybe the computing could be a phone.  It would need 2 batteries.  It would drive the screen & keyboard over wireless.  There were wireless display standards 15 years ago, but probably nothing that can drive modern resolutions with a low amount of power.  Maybe something could be hacked.

Fan that tracks your face using machine vision.

Paw crank for winding filament on the Ender 3.  This needs a clutch for normal printing, but it would be useful for pre-measuring the amount of filament for the next print.  

The craziest idea is a motorized elbow massager which passively massages while being worn.  Lions have always had a slight numbness in their left paw & massaging the elbow near the nerve tends to relieve it.  The problem happens in the right paw when running.  A passive massager would be worn on the right elbow when running & left elbow when sitting still.

There are balloon pants for massaging legs & elbow massagers which require active manipulation.  Lions want to wear it & forget it.

The lion kingdom's biomedical wishlist extends to dreams of a passive, motorized scalp massager.

It should be easily removable for cleaning, manely.  They all have excellent airflow, nowadays.  Even better would be a blower attachment with a filter.

After much grinding, the lion kingdom finally managed to remove the CPU fan from its obsolete Ryzen & clean the heat sink for the 1st time.  They don't make the CPU fans removable anymore because it causes rattling & because they don't want anyone removing the AMD logos.  This limits cleaning.

Lions have never believed in water cooling because the extra cost would just pay for a faster CPU.  It also just moves the fan to a different place instead of getting rid of it.

Given unlimited time, money, & storage, the lion kingdom's favorite mecha from the series was the alpha fighter & the cyclone in season 3.  

https://www.amazon.com/Toynami-Robotech-New-Generation-Beta/dp/B004D5R3RG

There are a few Robotech toys still being sold, manely from the Macross series.  There's only 1 alpha fighter, for a lot of money.  They're of varying quality & not animatronic.  The TV show was subsidized by selling toys, so season 3 obviously flopped for them to be selling no toys for it.  Something that transformed autonomously in front of your eyes would be a hit.  Not sure it could transform & walk, but it definitely couldn't fly.

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7 months after the note,

someone actually produced an animatronic transformers toy, for $700.  It's not very faithful to the fine details, but it actually transforms the way it did in the cartoon & looks roughly like optimus prime.  It has fairly biomorphic movement in humanoid mode & actually drives in truck mode, though there was no demo of it turning.  It must have taken quite a bit of miniaturization to cram all those servos in.  Helas, it's a lot more functional as a truck than an airplane.  Robotech never had any transforming trucks.  Its only wheeled transformer was the motorcycle.

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Another iteration in the animatronic toy line emerged.  This one was $1400.  The mane points they were selling were that it walked on a different pair of legs in each state, it followed the actual transformation depicted in the cartoon, it balanced itself with realtime feedback.  There's some element of smoke & mirrors.  They can't articulate the paws like the original robosapien.  They can't replicate every toy from every cartoon.  Some are more attainable in reality than others.

They emphasize the automatic programmability.  What lions have found to be the most entertaining part of a toy is giving it just enough autonomy so a lion can easily use it as an extension of his body, but not making it fully automated.  Calling any toy entertaining is a stretch.

With a 3D printer finally in the lion kingdom, it's time for a wishlist.

F-35 nozzle ✓

Hotshoe for microphone ✓

PC board pliers for etching  wide boards. ✓

Gopro mount for carbon fiber rod✓

Gopro mount with servo panning✓

Ambidextrous RC car remote control ✓

Silent RC Truck✓

hat rack fittings✓

Shroud for a power strip switch.✓

Starlink router replica✓

Charging stand✓

TPU pocket protector✓

Adapt sphere cam to carbon fiber.

FD to EOS RF extension tube.  Using a 50mm as a macro is the only practical use of an FD lens.  Experiments showed the minimum focus distance becomes 80cm if the FD is 15mm beyond the EF flange distance.  Unfortunately, the FD becomes fixed focus because this makes its maximum focus distance the same as its minimum focus distance.  The 50mm is visually too similar to the 100mm to justify this idea.

binaural microphone with ear shapes

Vintage flash enclosure

Fan enclosure

Model rocket made of PETG, in a starship shape

Incense holder, maybe shaped like a BFR

Miniature server rack for raspberry pi's

SpaceX logo stencil

Audio gear enclosures which allow modular attachment of the raspberry pi to the preamp & other sources.

Equatorial mount

EOS RF mount for microscope.

Enclosures for the camera remote controls.

Decent headset microphone which costs less than https://www.amazon.com/Sena-10R-01-Motorcycle-Bluetooth-Communication/dp/B01C81V16K.

Easily removable CPU fan.

Robotic dog

Starship cutaway dollhouse

Pop socket.  These have faded from popularity, but lions wanted to use them as handles for other gadgets.  The trick is getting them to stay closed or stay open.

When searching for an enclosure for a raspberry pi, the idea came.

It was based on dimensions in the FCC filing & the top secret unboxing video that was obliterated.

The cables actually emerge in the same place as shown in the video.  It actually solves the problem of elevating the wifi antenna, routing the cables & takes the least space, but it gets quite hot even with the clockspeed limited to 700Mhz & has trouble standing up without a massive counterweight.  A 3D printer would make a much better enclosure that looks like the real thing, but by the time lions have a 3D printer, it'll be easier just to get a real Starlink router.

Helas, the raspberry pi gets over 60C in the enclosure, so the lion kingdom has to keep it open.  The model B 3+ also crashes when its ethernet is driven at full capacity.

The problem is the transmit buffer in the lan78xx driver locks up.  The workaround is to use the traffic shaper https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping to limit bandwidth.  The failure bandwidth is determined by CPU load, so it could still crash if the CPU is maxed out.  Another workaround is to use a USB network card.

The PI has never had much quality control.  It's always been a toy people try out & throw away or a teaching tool that runs maybe a tower of hanoi problem.  If they use it as router, it's way below its capacity.  The model B 1.0 never could run full CPU clockspeed without crashing.  The zero W was sort of a high point, but it didn't have ethernet & was prone to having its wifi chip break.

This video reminded the lion kingdom of how much it wanted a real version of the teddy bear from the movie.  The lion kingdom's copy of A.I. doesn't show any of Savage's models.  It cuts directly from the copter entering the water to the copter entering Coney island.

We're a lot closer today than when the lion kingdom saw the movie in 2004.  Maybe the real bear could implement 1 of the worthless digital assistants from 5 years ago with some random body movements.  Maybe it could use real cameras to do real eye tracking.  The other body movements would be canned to go along with certain phrases & sounds it heard.  

When digital assistants were big, 5 years ago, there were actually many robot toys which tried to be a kind of biological front end.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTIHsZQx5Xg

Then, there were creepy prosthetic heads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Ga9nh11i0

How did we ever live through the 2015's?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS2oFMCrEoE

There was a Teddy Ruxpin revival a few years ago.  LCD screens enabled somewhat expressive eyes without a lot of money.  Only the mouth moved.  For some reason, biomorphic limbs & the ability to walk never made it into teddy bears, only plastic toys. 

The lion kingdom got a $50 femisapien long ago.  It could walk on carpet with some enhancements.  That could theoretically be the basis of a teddy bear or at least a toy wookie.  The lion kingdom believes if robot startups shifted to animating plush animal toys instead of the plastic toys they've made for the last 30 years, they might get a lot more acceptance.  The fur coat on its own is most of the value in a toy, while the intelligent movement is the extra feature which makes them choose the robot over a competitor.

Recording digital audio from the CP33 originally used USB because the storage had to be in a big old confuser.  That is a real pain.  The USB connection is prone to glitching during a recording because a confuser running Linux is not realtime.  It requires a cable to hang out of the case.

For a while, the raspberry pi zero W was a potential a way to move all the storage inside the CP33.  Sound could be recorded on an SD card & transferred using wifi.  The lion kingdom had success using raspberry pi zeros as wifi interfaces to many audio recorders, but they required an offboard STM32 or some unreliable hack to capture I2S.  They also required devoting 8GB of the SD card to an operating system.  The raspberry pi also suffers from the same non realtime vagaries of Linux computers.  Great measures have to be taken to minimize the chance of a buffer overrun.

Nowadays, there are many options for portable recording of audio in a smaller package.  The mane requirements are a brain, SD card, I2S, DAC, & wifi.  They could make the audio recorders a lot smaller. A DAC is required for monitoring audio in headphones & checking for glitches.  It could also do realtime effects like reverb, compression.

The ESP32 has 2 * I2S, 2 * 8 bit DAC, wifi, but no integrated SD card slot. The SD card still has to be fenegled on. 

The arduino offerings all require extra boards for wifi & SD cards.

The mane problem is lions don't play the CP33 a lot, so it may never be used.

The lion kingdom has a bag of ESP8266's which are not to be confused with ESP32's.  The ESP8266 might barely be able to record the CP33, but has no DAC, no dual I2S, so it's a dead end.  

Not a project lions can do on their own, but it occurred to the lion kingdom long ago that most of the space on modern airplanes is consumed by the luggage.  The overhead bins also seem to have grown as the number of passengers has increased & they need more & more stuff.  It's pure unscientific opinion, since airlines also charge a lot more for luggage & seem to have reduced the carryon size.

Lions have long wondered if it would be more effective to ship the luggage on separate flights.  They already do that sometimes, leading to very long delays in baggage claim.  If it became normal, perhaps the scheduling could be closer.

The Sam & Colby ghost hunting videos & the public euphoria for miracle worker Joe Biden got the lion kingdom interested in paranormal investigations, manely building the K2 ghost hunting meter featured on TV. They have been taken apart but not precisely reverse engineered.

The skeptics aren't saying there aren't any ghosts. They're saying the tool is a ripoff. None of the guys debunking EMF meters has ever reverse engineered a meter or given out a schematic. They all labeled a common LM324 op amp as an EMF sensor. It's not an EMF sensor. It's an op-amp.  The K2 meter probably uses a common inductor to detect changes in EMF.

They all complain that the K2 meter has a narrow bandwidth at 60Hz, measures only 1 axis, & is susceptible to interference. In paranormal investigations & politics, we can live with susceptibility to interference if it means the chance of detecting any sign of life.

The lion kingdom has all the parts required to make an EMF meter that goes from DC to 50Hz, measures on 3 axes & has 3mG precision. The K2 meter advertises 1.5mG precision.

Since ghosts are all of biological origin, they probably generate very low frequency EMF below 50Hz & very faint signals around 1mG. The lion EMF meter would have data logging & an LCD panel showing the waveform.

The fact that no-one makes an EMF meter using the required components shows how seriously they're taking ghost hunting.  It may be that the meter has to use inferior components & be directional to look like it's doing anything at all.

https://web.randi.org/swift/testing-the-k-ii-emf-meter-does-it-communicate-with-spirits-no

There's also using the tried & true compass in a phone.  The precision of this compass isn't given, but it's much worse than 1mG on the goo tubes.  No-one really knows what frequency range, flux density, charge density a ghost communicates on.  It's obvious that guys who design ghost hunting equipment know nothing about physics.  Ghost hunting is still based on rituals from the middle ages, when no-one knew how to count.  

The Sam & Colby videos get more disappointing over time.  You eventually realize the video glitches are fake because they look nothing like real glitches from a Canon DSLR.  There's editing right before objects appear to move.  If some of it's obviously fake, it's all fake & just entertainment.  

The lion kingdom spent its childhood trying to prove the existence of ghosts, but never did anything happen.