I often come up with ideas for inventions - usually without the skills or the non-laziness to actuallly make them.
My most recent idea is a car locator. Not the kind that tells you where the thief has taken your car, but a little handheld unit that you take with you into a store or the mall, and when you come out an arrow shows which direction your car is. Maybe a readout to say how far away even.
My favorite idea is a comedic car alarm. Functions like a normal car alarm (but maybe a little bit more sophisticated…) But when someone touches the car, it calls out in a rural deep south accent - “Hep me, hep me, somebody hep me! Get yo hands off my rear end! Hep me, won’t somebody please hep me?” (Probably would come off as a bit racist - sorry if I offend anyone)
So what ideas have y’all had?
(And if anyone wants to use my ideas, especially the first one, feel free.)
If I was a mad scientist I’d invent a device that would allow me to shock people through the telephone lines.
I’d use it at work, so whenever I got a stupid or nasty customer I could just zap-zap-zap 'em.
There would be a little yellow button on the phone, right next to ‘Hold’ and it would have a little picture of a lightning bolt on it.
Yeah.
Roller coast-to-coaster. New York to Los Angeles in ____ stomach-churning hours. Okay, I just did the math on this. Wow. I’m assuming the roller coaster’s speed is 50 mph, and that the actual distance travelled is 9000 miles because of all the loops. New York to Los Angeles in 180 stomach-churning hours!
Bacon donuts. Filled with bacon flavored frosting. Hopefully the donut gnomes can make pink and white striped frosting. Oh, and the donuts are topped with bacon bits.
I worked on this idea for a bit–it eats batteries like all get-out and the FCC would frown on it. Range-to-target is even less practical. Better to have a remote that triggers a locator sequence on the alarm (a programmed series of “here I am” sounds).
I heard one of these in college–one of the other ubergeeks had rigged his car to do a battlemech-type thing. “Weapon systems armed. Withdraw or be destroyed.”
I’ll not post anything I might ever sell, so my list will only cover a fraction of the odd things lurking in my lab.
Stun gloves–gloves attached to a stun gun supply (or a Tesla coil if I was feeling nasty) that let you pop arcs between your fingertips. Much more useful in a fight than a stun gun, which ties up one hand and is an obvious weapon. A bouncer friend of mine has them now, so watch out when you go barhopping. The liability issues killed my interest in marketing them.
gauss gloves–similar, but lined with tiny neodymium-iron-boron magnets. Never lose your grip on a ferrous tool again, and play interesting mind-games on people sitting in front of computer monitors. Probably not marketable (just cool).
limber lyre–a music lyre with a rotating head for marching band students. It lets you store music on both sides of your flip-folio pages for a long performance; you just spin it around during a break. (Too late, Bearflag–I patented this one in high school. No one was interested in licensing it.)
I may post more later–I need to clean up the lab, anyway.
Just as my teens were leaving home they announced this type of locator. Damn, who cares about thiefs? I wish I’d have had one or two to find out where my teenagers were! Now that would be a service you could sell maybe thru the PTA to all the parents of high school kids.
Waiting for the aviation expert Dopers to laugh their tits off at this, but it seems ok to me:
Have the blades of the propeller mounted in a short shaft within the hub. The blades are spring loaded so they are automatically drawn to the centre of the shaft. When the prop starts to turn, centrifugal force (or whatever the more scientific types call it) pulls the blades outwards by several inches until they hit an outer stop. The props rest on a specifically shaped carriage which moves within the shaft, and the shaft is twisted so the inner (stopped) position is fully feathered, and the outer (turning) position is at the appropriate angle for flying.
I know this doesn’t take into account variable pitch and such. Just a bored idea I came up with one day…
For a while, I was an Electronics Instructor at the Coast Guard Electronics Training Center. One December, when classes were pretty much non existant, some bored techs and I hooked up a fuzz buster radar detector with a nav radar transmitter. The theory was that cop radar receiver front ends probably weren’t expecting to get blasted back with a couple kilowatt return signal. We had to mess with the tuning and prr some. We don’t know for a fact that this was a successful countermeasure. We do know that during some high speed tests on the NY Thruway, the PA Turnpike and Interstate 80, no tester received a speeding ticket. But that could mean that there were no radar equipped police patroling those stretches of freeway at those particular times.
Before I was in the CG, our Uncle sent me to take nature hikes in the land of the Perfume River. I thought that taping a thermite grenade to the front of a claymore mine improved the anti personnel effect of the claymore.
The best invention I’ve ever heard of probably only exists in the imagination of Spider Robinson and anyone who’s read The Callahan Touch. In that story is described the perfect Irish Coffee machine. Roasts it’s own beans, grinds them, self cleaning, you name it. Just put a mug on the belt on one end, push a button or two, and at the other end comes the perfect God’s Blessing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was already invented and is available through some hoity-toity place such as The Sharper Image. But I think a personalized shower-temperature setter would be neat.
Know how you always have to fiddle around with the combination of hot and cold water before the shower is just right? Well, this would be a combination computer/thermostat that would have a number of pre-sets. It would remember the temperature (or temperature range) you like for your shower and recall it immediately. No waiting and fussing with the faucets. I could just press my preset code and know that the water was going to be just right for me.
Alas, like **Zyada[/z], I lack the know-how and the gumption to try to actually make a practical working model of same.
Two problems with using sounds - the first is if you exit on the wrong side of the mall, or are parked way out in the boonies of Grapevine Mills you won’t be able to hear the car. The second problem is if you are a lone female, you don’t want a bad guy seeing you leave the building and know exactly which car is yours long before you can see him.
Using a transmitter of some kind was one possibility I had thought of; however, another design would be to use a GPS. A transmitter that interfaced with the car could tell the GPS to store the car’s position whenever the car was turned off. The GPS could then calculate the angle from the unit’s current position, the car’s position when stopped and whichever direction north is. Distance calculation would be equally simple.
I actually invented the e-book. Seriously, YEARS ago I came up with the idea of a paperback sized flat reader with paper-white monitor and data cartridges. I drew pictures of it and everything, but I know nothign about electronics or programming, so I didn’t feel I could do anything with the idea. Then someone else came out with the exactl same thing.
Of course, they’re bombing in the marketplace, so it may not be such a big loss after all.
I don’t want to appear an uber-geek, but we’ve got one. It’s got 5 presets which store the temperature and pressure you want.
That said, the only thing sadder than having all this functionality at your fingertips is the fact that we (my wife and I) don’t use them. Just whack it up to 7 and full pressure. What a waste.
Actually, this gadget-freakery must run in the family; a few years ago my cousin remodelled his bathroom and installed the mother of all systems; it has presets to run his bath (amount/temperature) and shower. His airing cupboard (sorry - don’t know the US equivalent) has so much gear (pumps, valves, you-name-it) there’s no room for towels, much to his wife’s chagrin.
Think Invisible Fencing for dogs. Now, replace the electric currant with magnets and the dogs are replaced by children wearing magnetic vests. The property line around the house as the opposite magnet around the perimeter. So when the kids try to sneak off property, they are instantly repelled backwards. You may have guessed, we have no fence around our property. This idea also works in day care centers, jails and crowded situations with siblings and inmantes wearing opposite vests. It is tenatively called: **The Magna-Sitter ** Help your children build muscles while learning not to poke each other in the eye.
Along the same line of child watching devices I have mentally invented Velcro Pajamas with the opposite material that makes it work for sheets, carpeting and wall paper.
This recent brain drizzle came after visiting a graveyard and the ensuing conversation about “what do you want on your gravestone?” * A scrolling marquee. * Prearranged messages scroll eternally, or until a nuclear bomb drops. Funnier than an eternal flame and less fire hazard. Motion activated Bose stereo system extra.
Along the same morbid thinking: biodegradeable headstones and caskets appropriately named:* Worm Food Products.*
About 5 years or so before surround sound home theater systems were on the market, I conceptually invented what I call “3-D Stereo”. The user would wear a special headphone set that had little speakers above, below, in in front and behind each ear so that it would give the illusion of sound all around you.
My most practical invention was the pocket-sized pen. I got fed up with always having to hunt for a pen; carrying one in your jeans pocket is simply not comfortable, because it’s too long. Lightbulb, out came sharp scissors, cutting a used Bic (it had to be used, for the internal ink reservoir not to spill over everything when cut at the halfway point) in half, transferring the end cap to the new end, and voila, a pen comfortable to carry.
Speaking of “Dilbert,” have you ever visited the part of the official Dilbert web site called The Lazy Entrepreneur? It’s basically the same idea: People make up inventions, but never produce them. One of mine is on there (a remodifiable world globe with little tiles that can be replaced every time Mother Earth gets a facelift, as National Geographic once put it). Scott Adams himself has some interesting ideas there, too.
