Category: Feasible inventions

When you go to a museum you can fork out some extra cash and get a belt-load of electronics to provide you with a guided tour.

When you attend a giant tradeshow, such systems are rare. So today’s invention is an audio/visual guide to visiting such a tradeshow, based on regular smartphones.

A multi-day show can be a confusing and tiring event. This system would not only give an audio-visual description of the booths to which you were nearest (based on GPS), it would also provide extra contextual information about the individual exhibiting staff, for example, to whom you might want to talk (or schedule a meeting).

Exchange of virtual business cards of course would be possible, as would an optimised personal route through the event, based on your profile of professional interests, freestuff sought, eating requirements, current local crowd density and your planned visit duration.

I was surprised to discover that heating a domestic aquarium can cost as much as $50 a year.

Plasma TVs give off enormous amounts of waste heat. So today’s invention is to create a fishtank with a plasma tv on one side (probably facing outwards, so you don’t have to watch your programmes through waving kelp). Much of he waste heat from the screen’s electronics can be used to heat the tank’s water.

This might be mounted on a vertical-axis turntable, so that one can choose the ‘fish channel’ by rotating the system.

Obviously you’d need remote speakers, so the poor fish weren’t disturbed by the sound.

I’ve been so impressed by this whole cubelets idea for modular robotics.

Today’s invention is a response to their requirement for some novel, sustainable packaging.

Your new cubelets are delivered in an outer cardboard box (shown in grey but it could be suitably coloured/ branded). For simplicity, there is only one size of outer box -big enough to hold 20 cubelets -plus 20 empty cubelet-sized inner boxes (postage charges tend to be based on mass, not volume).

If you ordered some smaller number of robot cubes, n, the outer will also contain 40-n inner boxes. These act as padding to protect the bots from impact and they are also just big enough to store individual bots on one’s shelf at home.

When the outer is emptied, it can be folded and secured as a flat package by a tang which slides into a slot. If you have spare inners, these too can be folded flat and placed in the folded outer. Before returning to the factory to be reused, the box holder can identify themselves via a label on the outside (or even inside) of the box, thus encouraging subsequent customers not to ‘break the chain’ of goodwill and send their empty box back home.

Apparently there are 30,000 false motor insurance claims per annum in the UK in which criminals fake accidents to make bogus claims.

Today’s invention helps to lessen the problem (many ordinary drivers are subject to 25% premium increases, although that’s partly due to the usual finance and legal sectors’ greed).

When you buy a car and come to insure it, to minimise premiums you install a camera unit, sealed in a tamperproof, fireproof strongbox. This is locked to the vehicle interior and, using a set of mirrors, images events on all sides of the vehicle.

Any impact to the vehicle will be recorded, using a car alarm trembler switch, and several earlier minutes of footage radioed back to a central computer, so that suspicious circumstances can be detected (such as bad acting or wielding a sledgehammer).

Today’s invention is a safety device for firefighters.

This takes the form of a fireproof suit with a wrinkled surface – a little like that of the cerebrum. Essential tools and other items could be held on by straps to the outside, as usual, but the wrinkles would tend to trap air pockets without collapsing under load and provide better insulation for eg shoulders when in contact with flames.

The suit would be equipped with a canister of nitrogen.

When the interior temperature was approaching a dangerous level, a valve on the canister would release, causing the suit to inflate a little and distancing it from the surface of the body.

The inflation could take place over a few seconds and the suit’s surface wrinkles would still allow freedom of movement, whilst an escape was effected.

Today’s invention is a modified Segway.

The usual vertical-axis gyroscope would maintain an upright orientation but instead of employing an electric motor to drive the machine, the user would use pedals attached to the insides of the wheels.

This provides the compactness of a unicycle with the stability of the Segway and the exercise benefits of a bike.

I’m very keen on using disposable fountain pens. I like the line quality and don’t care if the odd pen or two goes missing (due to increasing absent-mindedness).

This problem extends to frequently leaving a pen down without its cap and then finding that the ink has solidified.

Today’s invention is therefore a fountain pen which gradually recaps itself, using a mechanism like these bathtoys.

If you put the cap on the non-nib end when writing, the string just pulls taught.

Leaving the pen down uncapped results in gradual recapping (after a period determined by shortening the string to one’s preference).

This also has the benefit that the cap is harder to mislay (It might actually be better if the string were replaced by a band like a spring-loaded tape measure).

I’m always surprised by the popularity of Barbie.

Today’s invention attempts to supply all such dolls (and even ‘Action Figures’ with a bit more emotional depth).

It consists of a rotating head with two facial expressions.

If you want to play a game in which Barbie is irritated by Ken’s complete inability to commit, then all you have to do is turn her head beneath her blonde hairdo.

We apparently see stairs as being significantly steeper than they actually are.

Everyone is being urged to do more exercise but they are always going to be dissuaded by stairs which look formidably steep. This effect lessens as you get nearer than 50m or so.

Today’s invention is to incorporate stairs in buildings which are placed at 90 degrees to the approach direction.

This removes the illusion of a hard ascent and may significantly improve people’s determination to avoid the lift.

When editing a document, I often make changes to a large number of different sections in rapid succession.

Then I may realise that one of the sections modified was actually better in an earlier incarnation, or contained useful information, now deleted.

Choosing a global ‘undo’ option doesn’t help, so today’s invention is a tool which allows me to highlight a region of the document and click back in time locally to reveal the full sequence of historical updates.