Archive for the ‘Gadgets, Toys, and "Inventions"’ Category
Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web
Here’s a video clip that I ran across earlier today. Kevin Kelly gives a TED talk where he basically shows how the entire internet has basically reached the computing power of a single human brain now. Theoretically, because the internet is doubling in size every two years, then by 2040 the internet will have exceeded the brainpower of the entire human race. Crazy!
Radio Controlled Helicopter
Chris took a video of me showing off my latest toy: a radio controlled helicopter. I crashed it later on after the video ended.
Special Effects
So I’ve been really busy lately with work and what not.
However, I *have* at least managed to play around with something new today: Adobe After Effects
Check out what I made after about 3 hours of tinkering (click the image to view the video):
Drawing a smiley face on the moon
What would you do if you had a billion dollars? I don’t know about you… but I would definitely develop a method to draw a smiley face on the moon. Call me crazy, but can you think of a better legacy to leave behind? Yeah. I didn’t think so.
Think about it. Future generations of mankind would look up in the sky at night, only to see a big smiling face. Wars would cease to exist! How could people even think about fighting with a giant smile in the sky?
Or maybe we could sell the moon one pixel at a time? Like the milliondollarhomepage.com site did?
Maybe we could use a high powered laser that would burn the dust and turn it black or something… *scratched his head*. What do you think?
Seriously though, what would you do if you walked outside one night and noticed a smiley face on the moon?
Successful Invention #1
One of the things that I always aspired to be when I “grew up” was an inventor. As a child, I would take apart toasters, pencil sharpeners, lawn mowers, and generally anything I could get my hands on that was broken and had some sort of intruiging moving parts. However, while I have come up with a number of concepts of my own over the years, until now there was never any actual follow-through.
Scenario: I have a thermostat in my apartment that I want to control with a schedule. I want to be able to cool down the house at night, but warm it up in the morning so I don’t have such a hard time waking up and getting out of bed. In previous apartment complexes, I was able to use a standard 7 day, programmable thermostat (available from Walmart, Lowes, or your favorite home supply store for around $30-$75). However, the heating system in my apartment complex here in Phoenix uses an old system and is incompatible with virtually all the programmable thermostats out there. I was only able to find one programmable thermostat out there that would work with my apartment’s heating/cooling system, but it didn’t have some of the capabilities that I was looking for. So I am basically limited to manually moving the needle on my thermostat by hand if I want to change the temperature. No programmable scheduling allowed!
Solution: Using a small servo, a mini SSC II controller, and a serial interface to connect it all to my computer, I built a remote controlled thermostat module. The servo is mounted on the wall above the thermostat and a string is connected to the needle. Once I figured out how to send commands to the servo using my computer’s com port, I interfaced it with PHP page on my local web server. I then built a flash-based interface with a draggable temperature slider that would send the proper positioning values to the PHP page. The end result… a thermostat in my living room that can be physically controlled from anywhere in the world over the internet.
Click here to watch a demonstration video clip!
(12 megs in size. Windows Media Player required.)