Invention Of The Day – Page 59 – Just another break-step productions sites site

#2283: HotDrawn

There is a large amount of discussion online about this brilliant idea for drawing in 3D.

Today’s invention is a simpler approach to the same task.

A pen has a reel of common-or-garden fast-melt plastic ‘wire’ at one end. The reel is motor driven so that depressing a button forces the plastic out at the writing end as a (solid) straight line.

Another button causes a small heater to rapidly soften (or melt) a very short section of the wire -just as it emerges (which is a lot simpler than having to use plastic which melts and then solidifies in milliseconds).

This allows changes of direction and bonding between preexisting drawing and newly-emerged material.

The next step would be to attach this devide to a robot arm and do simple 3D printing at high speed.

#2282: SpinWings

It seems that DARPA have identified a requirement to fly high-payload UAV missions from ships too small to accommodate normal takeoffs.

Today’s invention attempts to address that requirement (but without having to fill in their million pages of paperwork).

A cylindrical UAV fuselage has wings attached with variable pitch.

This machine is loaded into a mast (grey) which is then hoisted into a vertical position on the deck somewhere.

A cable around the cylinder is withdrawn, by a deck motor, very fast so that the entire drone spins out of the mast and into the sky. (Sensitive equipment would be located along the cylinder axis to minimise rotational acceleration effects).

At this point, one of the wings rotates about its axis into the same aerofoil configuration as the other and the red tailfins extend from the fuselage.

The internal jet engine fires up, the cylinder aligns itself horizontally, like a plane, and the system then does whatever democracy requires.

On return to the ship, the UAV reverts to helicopter mode and undertakes a remotely controlled descent into the conical mast collector.

#2281: PullPortal

People being able to push open doors is often just a bad idea. Collisions can occur if the door is solid and some doors are better left without any apertures (eg public lavatories).

Today’s invention is a door which can only be opened by pulling (irrespective of your direction of travel).

There are two parts to the image.

Each part is a plan view of the edge of a door and the direction controller mechanism.

In the lower part, the door is locked by the interference between the two prongs on the cylinder joining the handles and the two triangular blocks attached to the wall. The cylinder and prongs are sprung so as to naturally return to this position when the handle is released.

To open the door from the right hand side (upper diagram), rotate the handle clockwise so that the left prong points downwards and can then be pulled past the left triangular block (which is lower on the wall than the right block). This handle is attached to the cylinder via a ratchet which can only drive the cylinder when the handle turns clockwise.

Releasing the handle allows the cylinder to rotate back to its normal orientation. The door then moves back to its central position, driven by a normal door closer spring.

As it moves back, the left prong bypasses the right (upper) triangle and hits the left (lower) triangle, so that its face acts as a ramp and allows the left prong to slip over and into the equilibrium position.

Similar logic applies to opening the door from the left side.

#2280: Social Ties

Manufacturers are always attempting to engage buyers with their products via social networking.

Today’s invention deals with that issue in the style-conscious world of sneaker design.

Sneakers would come with a box of flat, coloured tubes (like heat shrink material).

These would be slotted onto laces to form a colourful pattern (after being allocated a unique one from the manufacturer’s website).

People with their own pattern could then use their smartphone to image the ‘barcodes’ formed by the laces to get access to the online profiles of other wearers of this design.

This would allow people to make friends, get dates etc. Bad behaviour would be limited by the identifiability of all wearers of this design.

A six-lace, five-colour arrangement would allow about 240 million different codes.

#2279: Mirrotater

Wing mirrors are always getting damaged and stolen.

Today’s invention makes use of the fact that certain rear-engined cars already have a filler cap in the wing.

This is used to accommodate a driver’s mirror which rotates out of the wing when the ignition is turned on.

Its rear face is aerodynamically sculpted, so as to reduce drag.

When tha car stops, the wirror is secured back in the wing.

Refuelling requires opening the lockable mirror and putting the nozzle in the duct indicated.

#2278: Bandrop

There have been many crazy schemes for dropping soldiers from the sky to the ground.

Today’s invention is in that proud tradition.

Imagine a bungee cord attached to a soldier via a harness. The other end of the bungee is wrapped around a high speed winch in a helicopter.

The winch adjusts the cord length continuously so that its stretched length (based on the weight of the individual soldier) is always 1m less than the altitude of the helicopter.

The soldier jumps out with a laser tape-measure attached to his boot.

When he comes to zero vertical velocity, at 1m above the ground, the tape measure detects this and sends a signal to detach the bungee from the winch.

The soldier then can drop from 1m without harm (but needs to avoid the descending cord).

(This provides a more rapid drop from low altitude than abseiling and with the required degree of derring-do).

#2277: Chewhistle

Having a toy-oriented dog can be a nuisance when their favourite is a squeaky bone or ball.

Today’s invention is therefore a ball with a high-frequency whistle embedded.

As the canine in question gnashes on his rubber pal, air is driven through the whistle.

This generates sound at such a high frequency that only he (and the other neighbourhood mutts) can hear…thus maintaining some measure of domestic quietude.

#2276: PackAging

It’s one thing to put unhealthy products like cigarettes in ugly packaging, but today’s invention seeks to get the message across in a more personal way.

When someone buys a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine, a photograph would be taken of them, by the machine.

This would then be processed in realtime to simulate the aging effects of tobacco usage and the resulting image printed onto the package.

A more positive marketing message might be used on healthy products, except that the image there would show some automatic wrinkle removal, eye whitening etc.

#2275: Stellaugmentation

There are lots of clever apps out there that will allow you to point your GPS-enabled smartphone towards the sky and see a detailed map of what celestial bodies are where.

None however, that I can find, offers the functionality included in today’s invention.

Instead of doing the standard thing of compressing stars into meaningless, 2-D constellations, the app which I envisage would portray the stars as dots with different diameters.

Closer stars would have a larger diameter.

This would also allow stars at a common radius to be shown on a translucent sphere (perhaps with different colours for each).

It would then be easy to animate the simulated movement in a given direction from sphere to sphere (and thus backwards in time).

#2274: ShiftKeys

Today’s invention is yet another attempt to alleviate my difficulties with the infernal interface known as the keyboard.

Imagine if the keys were attached to an underlying steel plate by magnets and were each fitted on a tiny cart so that they were capable of being driven rapidly to different positions on the plane (perhaps by altering the magnetic field in the plate).

The keys would move from their default qwerty layout, driven by a predictive-text spellchecker algorithm.

In this way, if my fingers are about to eg end the word ‘unlikely’ with a ‘t’ instead of a ‘y’ the y key could physically push its way under my erring finger, instead of the t.