Archive for: February 2008

I wrote a couple of days ago about a simple system for monitoring the strength of one’s tea, whilst your teabag is brewing in the cup.

Well, it’s time for a return to the exciting arena that is plumbing, by applying a similar approach to the flush toilet.

Imagine a light emitter and receiver pair located on either side of the toilet bowl (underwater). It can arranged that when the toilet is flushed, water only flows until its local optical transmissability returns to a preset level. This means that the flushing terminates a few seconds after the toilet has cleared itself and the remaining water is clean. In this way, massive amounts of water can be saved which would otherwise be wasted.

This would allow the use of a cistern taking the form of a tall, thin, flat-to the wall tank (more like a domestic radiator). If the bowl is sensed not to be not clearing effectively, a valve could be opened wider than normal to allow an inrush of water at much higher than normal pressure (due to the height of the tank).

This would allow the flushing to be adaptive to requirements and lessen the frequency of blockages. It would require a level sensor (or a flowmeter) to ensure that the amount of water supplied was never enough to overflow the toilet.

Adverts on vehicles are pretty inflexible. You usually get taxicabs or delivery vans with a giant sticker or even a full paintjob, in return for which the owners get some kind of regular payment.

Today’s invention is a more flexible way to get a mobile advertising message across.

I envisage panels of a vehicle’s bodywork each being equipped with an array of individual cooling contacts. These would locally cool the panel from inside the vehicle, forming a pattern in ice on the outside. This pattern could take the form of a high contrast, pixelated version of a famous logo, set in stark colour contrast to the normal colour of the unfrozen parts of the bodywork.

When a new sponsor was found, the pattern of cooling could be changed, by use of a computer interface in the vehicle, which would also allow selection of any required logos.

Big screens on electronic products are hugely wasteful of detail. Despite how things may seem, we don’t see the world in uniform high resolution at all. Instead, only about 1/3 of a degree is seen by the eye in great detail and the rest is really very blurred indeed (See this for more background).

Try finding the face of a relative in an unfamiliar team photograph…you have to scan serially before detecting the individual concerned.

Today’s invention allows people to exploit this phenomenon to generate the appearance of a large screen using a very small one (such as a cellphone). Just consider one eye for simplicity. The trick is for the system to sense the net direction of movement of the eye and to shift the image displayed in the opposite direction.

Once the eye starts moving, we might have only 0.01 sec before it is looking at the edge of the cellphone window…which suggests that the motion sensing might best be done by detecting electrical signals to the eye muscles (via eg an eyepiece containing tiny inductive coils).

If the eyes are starting to move leftwards relative to the screen, the image would be moved rightwards, so that the area to which attention is being drawn becomes rapidly centred on the small screen at high resolution. In this way, the illusion is created of looking at a much bigger image through a small window -which moves effortlessly to the area in which an observer is interested.

Anyone who uses public transport may well find themselves standing for a good part of their journey. You can’t make any kind of trip these days without being confronted by rattling, microwheeled suitcases pulled along by extendable handles. When I have to transport smart clothes about in a suitbag or case, they always arrive looking even more crumpled than me.

Today’s invention aims to address both the problems of limited seating and crumpled clothing, by turning the wheeled suitcase into a convenient mobile chair. People often end up sitting on their cases, but it’s certainly not comfortable and it never does the case any good.

A case is shown which consists of a rigid plastic box. This is the shape of a conventional suitbag, in frontal view, but in profile it resembles a playground chute. The box allows clothes to be fed in at the top without crumpling them. The case rolls along on wheels set into the base, propelled and steered by being strapped to a user’s arm. When he/she needs to sit down, the box’s wheels are withdrawn inside and it can be leant against a wall.

The box also has a small inlet in the base via which steam from eg a hotel kettle can be admitted in order to lessen further any tendency to creasing.

Even if they are careful, the average wearer of spectacles usually ends up parking their glasses, by accident, face down on some hard surface. The high cost of anti-scratch lens coating (which never really seems very effective) can be avoided entirely by use of today’s invention.

A pair of small, translucent plastic knobs are attached to the front of one’s spectacles, using two small self-adhesive pads. These are positioned at the top outer corners of the lenses, on the opposite side from the legs.

If the specs decide to roll forward onto the lenses, the protruberant knobs make it impossible for a flat surface to come into contact with any part of the optics themselves.

When I was a child, the Radiometer was probably the first device that I was aware of which the adults in my family couldn’t explain convincingly. I’m still short of a how-it-works theory which satisfies me, but it forms the basis of today’s invention.

I noticed that the vanes of the radiometer which I was given 30 years ago had recently stopped moving. Wiping a small area of dust from the top caused them suddenly to restart. It occurred to me that here we have a system capable of measuring more than household dust. It is a potential, low cost monitor of airborne pollution.

This is a matter of concern for me because I regularly spend time working by the window of a city centre office which is visibly speckled with sooty particles. Using a suitably calibrated radiometer, I can now be aware quantitatively of the ambient level of atmospheric particulates inside the building -when the vanes become immobile, it’s time to evacuate or activate the expelair.

This simple system incorporates a small fan, to accelerate the deposition of specks on the glass, and a selection of smoked glass filters to boost the sensitivity to their density. This could be supplied to urban schools, for example, in order to protect children from pollution.

Anything which is string-like, and which has an untethered end, can get itself into a tangle. Whether it’s an electrical cable, a headphone wire or a mountaineering rope, these tangles can be costly and even dangerous.

Today’s invention is a system for automated untangling of such strings (although it won’t cope with tight knots). This could be built into the end of many ‘stringy’ components and automatically activated periodically to ensure tangle-free operation.

The free end of each tangled cable is looped around and attaches to itself using a profiled ‘nose’. This nose is then driven slowly along the cable, pulling the free end with it. The nose thus passes through all the loops and loose knots until it reaches the other end of the cable, leaving a single U-shaped loop behind it.

The driving force for the nose is generated by successively adding C-shaped beads to the string behind it. This mechanism might be used as a drive for other small tethered ‘vehicles’ which need to progress along a complex, curving track (eg curtains, or zips).

I’m always interested in the idea of symmetry. Actually, the real interest is in asymmetry -especially whenever that arises apparently spontaneously.

In today’s world, everyone in the comfy developed countries is exhorted to ‘downsize their carbon footprint’, even if those doing the exhortation have no concept of what that means (suddenly Carbon is a bad thing?).

My proposal is to concentrate on waste and specifically wasting electricity. Today’s invention, without any official hectoring, is simply to create switches for everything electrical which are quite difficult to switch on and very, very easy to flip off. This would cause users to pause and think ‘do I really need to switch the X on?

The difficulty might involve a multi-step ‘on’ process, rather than one involving great amounts of finger strength (think about trying to log off from Windows, where you get asked that infuriating ‘are you sure?’ and imagine applying that to energy-absorbing systems). It might take the form of greater frictional resistance to the movement of a switch, or a sound effect which is a slightly annoying whine in the ‘on’ direction and applause when you switch off. Now that fingerprint readers are available at a few dollars on thumb drives, switches might only activate for certain individuals. (A symmetrical version might even record how many times that person switched on and didn’t switch off).

The asymmetry which any such threshold creates, can perhaps make people think before they act. If this user-unfriendly development had the effect of making people never switch anything off, then each electrical apparatus could be made to automatically deactivate after a certain length of time. This period would have to be set by the user, before the on switch could be activated.

I’m often advised to clean my teeth with the toothbrush in my left hand. Aside from the subtle cognitive benefits which undertaking a task using the non-dominant hand like this may bring (who knows why), a monodextrous brushing pattern leaves areas of one’s mouth less uniformly cleaned.

Today”s invention is a way to help remind people to alternate the brushing action between hands on successive occasions.

The brush is stored in one of a pair of model fists, which are joined together, and this unit sits on a shelf orientated to match the user’s fists, when held out in front. Each model fist has a hole in the top to accommodate the handle of the brush.

On removing the brush from one hole, it drags the platform on which it rests upwards (a small magnet is attached to the brush and to each platform). This closes the hole and opens the one in the other fist.

When brushing is complete, the brush is then located in the open fist, which corresponds with the hand to be used next time.

When one’s tyre treads wear down towards the legal limit, it’s not always obvious (until you end up parked in a hedge perhaps).

Today’s invention is a way to become aware of this problem in advance of a terminal loss of traction.

A band of hard plastic would be inserted, during manufacture, in one of the circumferential tread gaps. This would eventually be exposed to the road surface as the surrounding rubber wears away. When this occurs, serrations in the surface of the plastic make a characteristic buzzing noise as the wheels rub on the road.

This would be annoying enough for people to find it necessary to visit a garage quickly to buy new tyres. The noise might even be made to increase and decrease in frequency, in a siren-like way as the wheel in question rotates.