Ideas/Idea Farm

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  • chocolate chip sized truffles: add another layer to cookie enjoyment. --strages 17:30, 19 January 2008 (CST)
  • Pop Rocks truffles: Russian roulette box of chocolates. --strages 17:30, 19 January 2008 (CST)
  • "I Clap at Movies" website or group or something so that I can better understand these people and why they do this. --strages 17:30, 19 January 2008 (CST)
  • People watching + small acts of kindness + twitter and maybe some photography. There's a website idea here, I just need to figure out the best way to pull it off. Literally woke myself up from a dead sleep with this one. --strages 14:51, 6 February 2008 (CST)
    • As in a 'Caught Being Kind' website? --Spacefelix 18:08, 22 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Make templates that format the Category pages to look like the standard in user pages we've been using. Including the status and the user that created the page(the person who's project it is). --strages 23:58, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Piano gloves. Piezoelectric pads on the finger tips hat convert the compression of the finger on the table to electricity to play a note. The more pressure the louder the note. I need to work out hand positioning so you know where the notes are though and maybe pads for the feet to correspond to pedals. --strages 15:10, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
  • A wooden slide, lacquered and polished, with cheap recycled tissue paper as mats to ride down it with. --strages 18:10, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
    • This came to Saratheneale in a dream. Have no idea if it'll work.
  • Bettermints(play on betterments): perhaps some sort of vitamin enhanced mint. --strages 21:54, 6 April 2008 (CDT)
  • Could sunlight transmitted via fiber optic cable be trapped in a closed loop of fiber for an indefinite amount of time? --strages 07:29, 8 April 2008 (CDT)
    • Light travels at 186,000 miles/second so that's 186,000 miles of fiber for one second of natural sunlight. Highly impractical in the event it could be done, but how fast is a camera flash? --strages 07:29, 8 April 2008 (CDT)
      • For a 3ms flash, we would need 558 miles. But what about a box of mirrors as a photon trap? Or maybe even this? It just occurred to me if you built a sheet of a material that slowed down light and let it out very slowly, you would have a slow-moving photograph of an event in time (or whatever the sheet has last been exposed to). --Spacefelix 11:55, 2 June 2009 (CDT)
    • How quickly does light leak or get absorbed as it travels through fiber? Assuming the light can be trapped at all, what is the longest amount of time we could wait before measuring it? jmcarthur 17:19, 21 July 2009 (CDT)
      • Very quickly. Given its high velocity and it's interaction with the atoms of its medium of propagation, where it either has its electromagnetic energy scattered or converted to heat, it would attenuate in a very small time interval. --Spacefelix 13:59, 1 October 2010 (CDT)
  • A kind of "Take a penny, leave a penny" kind of site. You upload something 10MB or less and you are presented with a list of things on the server that you can download, but you can only download one item per item uploaded. --strages 06:40, 12 May 2008 (CDT)
  • Buy a decent(wattage) peltier, place it head side down at the focal length over a parabolic mirror so as to focus the sun's rays on the surface. This should generate electricity. I need to find out how much and at what efficiency. I think it'll be more efficient than a solar cell at doing the same thing. --strages 00:19, 24 May 2008 (CDT)
  • Copper pennies prior to 1982 were made completely of copper rather than zinc as pennies after 1982 are made. Copper pennies weigh 3.1 grams and zinc pennies weigh 2.5 grams [1]. I'd like to make a penny sorting robot based on this property. --strages 00:19, 24 May 2008 (CDT)
  • Slide rule tattoos for the underside of your forearms. Geekiest tattoo ever! --strages 18:23, 9 June 2008 (CDT)
    • Ones on one arm, tenths on the other. So now both of your arms form a slide rule. --Spacefelix 11:55, 2 June 2009 (CDT)
  • Giant sized slide rule. Like 10' long. Cool enough, but cooler if it were mechanized to perform a calculation you feed it over tcp/ip...or serial...or whatever. --Korc 18:41, 9 June 2008 (CDT)
  • Rubic's Cube house... --strages 18:53, 24 June 2008 (CDT)
    • If each room were a subcube of the Rubic's Cube House, then that would mean people could move their rooms to wherever they wanted just by shifting the puzzle. --Spacefelix 11:55, 2 June 2009 (CDT)
  • Molotov cocktails using sugar glass bottles.
    • Less mess to clean up, relatively. --strages 18:49, 7 July 2008 (CDT)
  • Evaporative cooling tower for the backyard. --strages 21:31, 31 July 2008 (CDT)
  • Tensegrity tent as an extension of the shed in the backyard. --strages 21:31, 31 July 2008 (CDT)
  • Water balloon fights: --strages 21:23, 29 September 2008 (CDT)
    • Ship a box of several hundred water balloons to Inergi across the street from the Make Shop with a date and a note signed "Makers Local 256".
    • Ship a box of several hundred water balloons to Hacker Consortium with a note listing a date and GPS coordinates located on the Alabama/Tennessee border and signed "Makers Local 256".
  • 3D Printer/Scanner - Using a RepRap or other 3-D printer/CNC Machine, a 3-D scanner and 3-D CAD software. Concept being worked under CNC Machine Project.

--Spacefelix 18:04, 22 July 2009 (CDT)

  • ASL Translator - Webcam app that observes what is signed in ASL and is turned into text. Can be spoken using a text-to-speech app. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Backpack Glider & Scope - A lightweight telescope and an RC glider that can fit into a backpack-sized case. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • ML256 Telephone & Video Conference Table - Set up a table with full VoIP and Video over IP capability. Develop a lightweight web-based applet that can let someone outside join the conference online (minimum dialup). --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • ML256 Tour Bus - Buy an old bus and modify it into a shop on wheels with a places to eat, cook, sleep, bathe and live. We can take it to conventions and use it as a project display piece and a place to stay. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Radioactive Barrel Podium - Have a full multimedia presentation system in a steel drum on wheels. The system would include a computer with peripherals, speakers, a microphone, a paper stand and a projector. The barrel can be painted to look like a radioactive barrel. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Real Instrument Guitar Hero - Have a Guitar Hero-like program that instead of taking inputs from a controller, takes the direct sound input of a musical instrument (either by direct plugin or microphone) and determines a musician's performance against a score or soundtrack of music. Think like the vocals for Rock Band. Can start with Frets on Fire. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • RF Popcorn Popper - Pop popcorn using the power of RF! --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Wearable Shop Camera & Phone - A way for video and audio communication in the shop between a person working on the floor and another person at a computer. Mount a minicam and an earbud headphone & microphone on a set of safety glasses or headphones. Feed the data to a belt or pocket-mounted wireless transmitter that will relay video and audio data to the shop server. The server then transmits the video and audio over the internet using VoIP and Video over IP to the other person at a computer. This way, someone at the shop can show another over the net what they are working on and they can discuss it in real time.
  • Wifi Flying Drone - Have a solar-powered UAV with a WiFi hub and GPS programmed to hover at or orbit a specific point. A quick way to have internet access anywhere you want it. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • ML256 Shop Bath and Kitchen - Install a shower and washing machine in the shop and a basic kitchen. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Regular BBQs/Cookins/Cooking Classes - Once a month, hold a cookout/cookin potluck at the shop where everyone brings something to cook and we all get to learn how to cook something. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Regular Company/Tech Presentations - Once a month, have someone from a local company come and talk about their company and present something techy. This would be a great opportunity for people to learn about local job/networking opportunities and see what technology is being worked on in Huntsville. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Regular Safety/Make Classes - Once a month, have someone conduct a class on shop safety or simple make projects to get people into the groove of the shop. --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • Saturday Afternoon Shop Talk - Every Saturday Afternoon, we freeze work for half an hour so everyone can present or talk about what projects they are working on --Spacefelix 02:18, 4 July 2009 (CDT)
  • ML256 Shop Webcam Face ID & Display - Have a simple face ID app that can identify and project a person's name over their head on the shop webcam display. That way, we can tell who we are looking at in the shop. --Spacefelix 17:07, 20 April 2011 (CDT)
  • Open source paper printer
    • It doesn't make sense to me that the open source community has jumped on 3d printing when 2d paper printing is so much more ubiquitous right now and in desperate need of attention. Additionally, many of the principals to use stepper motors is similar, only the print head and paper handling need special attention. I think a dot-matrix printer can be hashed out in a few weeks, and a low-resolution inkjet for text documents would be a larger, yet doable, endeavor. --ctag 2014-6-29
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