I am an armchair inventor from time to time, aren’t we all? Watching shows like Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank make me realize that I’ll never want to spend that much time or money on a project that just might recoup the amount put into it.
Today’s invention: Dishwasher wipes. A single serving that has two packets. One soapy wipe which is infused with Palmolive or Dawn dish soap. The other packet is the wet wipe (with just a little bit of water) to clean off the soap and particulates.
We have a refrigerator and microwave at work but no sink outside of the bathroom sink to do dishes. I have a tub of cream cheese for bagels as well as bringing in Tupperware and utencils for lunch from time to time. So, instead of having to go to the bathroom and wash my eating stuff (gross), why not be able to do a quick two-packet wipe and have 'em cleaned at my desk.
It’s probably not a billion dollar seller, but I’d love to have a bunch in my work drawer.
You know those shoes with the skates in it? I came up with those back in 95, years before they ever hit the market. Even made a prototype that I wore for a few days. (I was 14 then.) Unfortunately I never thought about patenting them, so I lost out big.
I invented a game called Sproing. Before the Internet it was a great thing for bored office workers.
Unbend a paperclip. Smaller sizes seem to work better. Form it into more or less a circle. There should be space between the ends. The idea is to hook one end under under the other such that the slightest touch causes it to unhook. It should be about as sensitive as a mousetrap.
Hook it, place it about an inch over a desk, and let go. With luck and skill it should bounce up about 2 feet.
Get it to land in your coffee cup - 1 point
Get it to land in someone else’s coffee cup - 2 points
Their cup is still full of hot coffee - 10 points
Marching band musicians often use a little widget called a lyre, which attaches to your instrument and holds a folder full of small pieces of sheet music. Our band often had enough music that we used both the front and back of each page of the folder, so we had to unclip the folder and flip it over to get to the other half of the music. I found this inconvenient, so I designed and prototyped a modified lyre with a rotating joint that allowed me to reverse the folder easily without detaching it. I was the envy of my fellow musicians and made a few more prototypes for friends; I even considered pursuing a patent, but I didn’t really have the resources to do so at the time.
I have come up with numerous electronic circuits for my own projects; for example, I have made switching power supplies based on not commercial SMPS controllers but simple comparators (which work just as well and are more customizable).
I also make video generators which I call matrix generators which are based around a couple SRAM memory chips and a lot of buffers to multiplex the addresses and data lines so that one is written to while the other is being read for display data (a control signal, which doesn’t have to equal the refresh rate, switches between the memories during vertical refresh so the one that was written to is now read and vice-versa). A similar circuit put inside of the monitor, which is usually separate, enables it to receive a simple serial bit stream instead of a complex video signal (the main difference is that a counter is used to count up addresses, instead of random-access); this makes it much easier to transmit data (all digital and noncritical timing). For more than one bit per cell (equivalent to pixels), it is easy to expand the basic circuit to up to 8 parallel channels (most SRAMs have 8 data lines) without adding much, if any additional circuitry (each buffer can control 8 lines, with address and data controlled by the same one).
The displays that I use are also largely custom-designed, using various technologies such as CRTs (using parts from TVs and monitors but not the original circuitry, save for some parts) and LEDs/dot matrix displays (I haven’t used any LCD displays yet, but if I did, I would bypass the controller and directly drive the LCD drivers with the aforementioned matrix generator circuit for maximum flexibility).
Now, I don’t know how much of what I have designed is original (the “matrix generator” concept came from an old book on TV-based video games; in that case, it was based on 74154 TTL multiplexer ICs with manual wiring of cell states; I use a variation of this circuit but with more modern ICs and shift registers (serial data loading) for simple matrix generators).
I actually hold four patents (for a device for measuring liquid heights in bottles, two for measuring contact lenses, and one for suppressing reflection for optical measurements), but I came up with two inventions in my dreams:
– a 3D TV set. It would work, too, but I’m certain it’s already been thought of. Today’s 3D TVs are more sophisticated.
–a miniature (tpy) car powered by a butane lighter.
In my first nursing job, I worked with people whose veins were very fragile. Putting in an IV just for medications was an ongoing pain for everyone involved. I put together a way to give IV meds without running an IV continiously. It became an approved method throughout the hospital. I didn’t think of patenting it. :rolleyes::smack:
Not much later it was patented by someone else and is used all over the world. It’s called a Heparin Lock.
I didn’t invent it, but years ago I had a prediction about computing. I predicted that hard drives would become obsolete, and that all personal data would be stored in large data warehouses and accessed via sattelite.
Today we have cloud computing and wireless Internet.
Yeah, but hard drives are still the most popular storage medium, if not the best (due to cost), and most personal data is still kept on local computers (the only data that I have on the Cloud is stuff like this forum and I wouldn’t call that personal data, although in college I did have some online courses). I suppose that using the Internet for any reason counts though. Also, wireless mostly uses terrestrial transmitters, not satellite.
I’ve wanted to create a combination light timer/dimmer. So that when I go into the shower first thing in the morning, I can turn on this device and have it gradually bring the brightness of the lightbulbs from 0% to 100% over the course of five minutes or so. That way, my still asleep eyes are not immediately assaulted by the bright bathroom lights.
I designed a hydraulic steering system for outboard motors back when cable system were the only thing available. I made detailed drawings of the system as well as drawings of the component parts—back then i was competent to do that. I lacked a machine shop to build a prototype and i couldn’t afford the cost of hiring one.
I don’t know how many circuits I’ve designed. For whatever reason, my mind doesn’t put them in the “inventions” category. The devices they end up as part of may or may not constitute inventions by my standards. I suppose that if I came up with a really novel type of circuit, I might call it an invention.
That’s basically what I want, but I want it built into the light switch in the bathroom, so that by the time it’s up to 100% brightness, my eyes have adjusted and I can shave without injuring myself.
My thought-invention is ass-wipes. That is, a kind of moist towelette that you’d use to “finish off” after your normal wiping with dry toilet paper; it would have some kind of gunk on it to both properly clean and soothe the bunghole. It would have to be suitable for all sewerage systems of course.
The idea being that trying to clean an irregular surface of sticky matter by wiping with dry squares of paper is, to put it mildly, unreliable.
It would be available in small purse-packs for the ladies, but I guess for blokes would have to be in a dispenser in the cubicle.
I once had the brilliant idea of a silent lawn mower that uses a laser to cut the grass. It didn’t take much reading to find out that not only was it hugely implausible, I wasn’t the first to think of it. One of the first sentences in a book was, “Don’t even think about using a laser to cut grass.” I still think a silent lawn mower is a good idea if it can be done.
As an aside, I once met a lawyer who helped inventors patent their work. Being an ethical kind of guy, he regularly turned work away on the grounds that perpetual motion devices aren’t supposed to use batteries.
Count down clocks, designed for children, folks with autism, adults with ADHD, and the otherwise perpetually late. It works like this: program the time for an important event, like your child’s bedtime, or when Elfie has to get her butt out of the house to make it to work on time, and a large LED display will count down to the time - know at a glance how many minutes you have left until IT’s TIME!! There would be an actual time display too, but smaller, situated above the count down. I’ve seem a few but with no time display, uh folks, those are timers, not clocks.
I came up with a design for an air-powered car, based on a toy I had at the time, when I was about 10. Twenty years later, the same basic idea was used for the first production air car. My version was going to use something like a ram-scoop with battery power, coupled with solar panels, to replenish the air while driving and extend the range, but that would probably be too much in the way of materials to be worth it. And without running calculations more complicated than I know how to set up, I don’t know whether the energy balance would make that worthwhile either.