Category: Possible inventions

Spray painting vehicles has been an automated, ie computer-controlled, process for over thirty years. Great efforts are made to ensure consistent, uniform-looking painted surfaces.

Today’s invention is a way to invert that emphasis and provide eg motor vehicles with the same kind of subtle patina, from new, as say stonewashed jeans.

A computer-controlled spray gun would adjust, in a continuous way, the relative amounts of matt and gloss paint being applied to a bodyshell. Planar regions would be matt-er, sharply curved regions shinier. This would give an interesting impression of wear by contact with high-speed streamlines, for example.

It would also be possible, given the usual CAD model of the surfaces involved, to apply a different level of shine corresponding to the general local curvature properties. This might even enable cars to be formed using simple (ie cheaper) geometry, but whose appearance could be made more convoluted and ‘characterful’ just by painting (a little like blusher on cheekbones).

Various off-road vehicles are now being equipped with rubber tracks rather than the traditional multi-link metal ones that have been around since 1916 or so.

This offers many advantages such as reduced roadwear and noise but today’s invention takes things a step further. The vehicles would have multiple wheel units which would allow them still to move if one was damaged. The rubber tracks would each be moulded in a single loop, with no joints. A number of these loops would be carried on the exterior of the vehicle (possibly compressed flat).

When a track needed replaced, the wheels on its unit would be spun to shed any remnants and the vehicle driven to a fresh patch of ground. A track loop would be dumped off the back and made to stand on its tread. Some wheels on the unshod unit would be drawn in radially and the vehicle skewed so that they enter the central space like fingers fitting inside a bracelet. The wheels would then be expanded to locate the rubber track on their rims.

Many track loops could be carried and vehicles could even swap loops rapidly -without occupants ever having to dismount.

The CD player in many computers is becoming increasingly redundant…at the same time as concerns grow about these machines overheating.

Today’s invention is a CD with no playable content but which has radial slots which allow segments to be twisted slightly out of the plane of the disc, to form fan blades.

When this disc is in place, the CD drive motor is run in response to internal temperature increases.

I’m greatly impressed by systems such as this which can park the heads of a dropped laptop’s hard disk before it hits the deck.

Today’s invention is a technology with a different operating principle, but similar objective. The mantis shrimp is a marine creature which clubs its prey so fast that the impact generates a tiny spark of light. This phenomenon of sonoluminescence might be used by engineered systems to automatically protect themselves from the effects of impact.

Imagine eg a laptop dropped onto a hard surface. It could be equipped with a fine, water filled conduit connecting the corners (ie regions of high impact probability). On contact with a hard surface, photodetectors would register any luminescence and switch off sensitive internal systems before the solid- transmitted shock wave would have time to pass through them. This system would work without having to sense any sudden accelerations (except, indirectly, the crash itself).

I travel quite a lot on trains. These are haunted by ‘guards’ who seem to make a fetish of checking the doors are open or closed, waking up sleeping passengers and bellowing the names of stations after the PA system has just done this. Their main function is to check that people have paid to travel, in a rail network where fitting ticket barriers at all the minor stations would be prohibitively expensive.

Today’s invention does away with all this ridiculous manual ticket checking. Each train door would be equipped with pair of unidirectional gates like the ones which are used at football grounds. People could leave the train freely through one side and enter via the other side by inserting their ticket.

Only the trains would thus need barriers fitted and they could therefore be removed from all stations, greatly improving the flow of passengers and their safety in emergencies. This approach would allow an accurate count to be made of the individuals on board a train and thus ensure that dangerous overcrowding was detected and minimised.

Very few generals or police chiefs would be prepared to act as a test target for called non-lethal weapons. People regularly get killed by rubber bullets.

Today’s invention is a way to make such weapons, if they must be used, actually incapable of causing death.

This involves adapting a conventional ‘riot gun’ in order to propel its projectile using compressed air. It would probably need to be fed from a cylinder on a small trolley (thus limiting the ability of forces to pursue individuals in a crowd at pace).

The weapon would be equipped with a range finder (probably a stereo vision device, rather than acoustic, given the background noise in the average street-level contretemps). Once having determined the range of an individual, the pressure delivered to the chamber, behind the baton round, would be increased or decreased in order to ensure that the impact speed would be constant -and always less than a dangerous velocity.

I’d be keen to see the use of rotten potatoes, whose aerodynamics is pretty straightforward to predict and whose lethality is inherently limited.

According to Mech Eng 1.01, fluid flows more easily in this duct from right to left than from left to right. Careful choice of the geometrical details enables that difference to be maximised, for a given fluid and speed.

Today’s invention makes use of this basic asymmetry by forming a marine drive unit from a matrix of these ‘leaky valves.’ The valves would be wafted fore and aft within a submerged duct, preferentially propelling fluid more to the left than to the right (and thus driving the vehicle slowly rightwards).

Each valve would be driven axially by an independent magnetic field, fluctuating in both frequency and amplitude so that:

a) the vessel’s acoustic signature would be more like white noise and thus harder to identify than the less variable frequency of a rotary drive
b) electrically-driven valve matrices could be located in pods anywhere on the hull of a vessel
c) each matrix could sustain some significant damage without stopping
and
d) marine creatures, such as whales, would be less disturbed by the resulting clamour.

It just occurred to me that fitting these to the surfaces of a future generation of submarines that swim like fish would add to the ‘grip’ they exert on the surrounding fluid and allow speedier movement (think of each cylindrical section of an eel’s body, twisting to the left and right about a vertical axis).

A fingerprint expert need only find around 16 similarities between a print at a crime scene and the one on your finger to be taken seriously in court when recommending your conviction.

Today’s invention makes use of the idea that fingerprints, for all their complexity, seem to differ from each other by only a relatively small number of features. This is true of diagrammatic faces too, so the idea is to map one’s fingerprints to a simple iconic facial representation of each individual. The distances between significant features in a print might then be used to draw a face, using them as dimensions between eg eyes, cheek-to-chin, eyebrow width, etc.

Such faces, although not provably unique to an individual, could be generated automatically from a fingerprint scanner and used as avatars -thus providing a characteristic, recognisable representation, whilst also preserving online anonymity. A system which insisted on working only with dimensions fed to it from a laptop scanner would make it hard for anyone to pose behind an avatar which was not their own.

Just because something is an incredibly clever mechanical design, needn’t preclude an electronic upgrade.

Todays invention is a(nother) Rubik’s cube which is simply more ‘today’ than 1975.

Take a solid cube of black plastic material. Embed on each face 9, colour-switchable leds, in a 3×3, grid pattern. Each led is also equipped with a simple light sensor.

This device operates by always ‘turning’ one end of the cube relative to the rest of it (ie what would have been the nine adjacent small cubes which formed an end face in the old-fashioned mechanical era). Place three fingers over the detectors on one, 3×1 face of this end-9 (not the end face, of course). Place the thumb over one of the squares in the 3x 1 on the opposite face.

This pattern of occlusion of the detectors immediately changes the colours of the lights to simulate the turning of one end of a traditional Rubik’s cube (This system could easily be extended all the way to cubes made of up to 4×4x4 small cubes).

Proceed to solve the puzzle as fast as possible, even in the dark.

I’ve been reading about designing electronics using evolutionary techniques.

Each design can be boiled down to a bit string. You build a large number of circuits, each based on a different string. Choose the ones which best fit your design spec (fitness function) and recombine their parts to create a new set of bitstrings…Eventually, the behavioural features you want, start to appear.

The trouble is that, although this can yield great performance, using small numbers of components, just as with neural networks you often can’t tell how the resulting systems are working. Fine for a disposable mobile phone, not so good in a jet engine control circuit.

Today’s invention is the inclusion in the fitness function for an electronic design, of some measure of its “understandability”…or at least simplicity of operation. Each design would have an associated complexity (eg algorithmic complexity) represented in its bitstring. Minimising this would contribute to the overall fitness of a given design.