Should 3D print a thing that has grooves at 30, 45, and 60° on it and a long flat side that can sit where the wood sits on the chop saw, then you can (with the saw off) pull the blade down to align and tighten it without needing to guess or measure or anything.
Bonus points if it’s pretty tall/deep slits so you can verify that its 90° from the bottom surface too
Pretty simple in theory:
Drone that automatically takes off, flies up to pre-defined and consistent location, and takes pictures of various types of the sky/sunset/sunrise/etc. Would be cool if it had enough flight time to also do a little timelapse or something of said sunset/sunrise.
Difficult areas to make this happen:
Other things needed but theoretically not difficult?
Would be really cool if it also is solar powered or something and can be mostly self-sufficient as long as it has a data connection of some sort (4G? WiFi? etc)
Inspired by this, which is inspired by “NASA Parachutes”:
https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/bec-brittain-paraciphers/
Basically a little desk/bookshelf/whatever lamp that has a cylindrical base with lights that point up and a fan, then a slim metal rod sticks up with a little wide flat spot on top of that. Above that would be a very light “parachute” that is modeled after some sort of cool parachute that has a lot of light colors, that is tied down to the cylinder and the rod sticks up inside of it.
When the lamp is turned on the fan and lights kick on, the fan inflates the parachute and the lights shine into the parachute, with the light colored parts acting as a diffuser/lamp shade to spread the directed light around the area as a whole.
Might make sense to tie the parachute to the rod in some way to avoid it spinning and tangling itself up. Probably will take a good amount of fiddling to get the parachute to inflate every time, but could be fun.
I wanna make a map that shows the weather at various points on mars over time. Something that looks and feels like the “overview” weather maps, but obviously with less data points.
Like this:
There’s old historical data from missions like Phoenix lander, and much more recent (some still updating) data from missions like Insight, MSL/Curiosity and M2020/Perseverance. Ideally the landing events (and therefore new data events) would be highlighted on the map as it changes day to day and the data points would move slightly as the mobile sources (MSL/M2020) rove around.
MSL “live” data: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/weather/
Insight latest data (not gathering right now): https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/weather/
M2020 “live” data: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/weather/
Maybe useful for old Phoenix data: https://atmos.nmsu.edu/data_and_services/atmospheres_data/phoenix/met.html
Maybe useful in general: https://atmos.nmsu.edu/data_and_services/atmospheres_data/MARS/mars_lander.html
All the data needs to be acquired, time correlated, location stamped, and then projected onto a map of the surface of mars.
Might be fun to read some papers on mars weather patterns and extrapolate what we can from that in other areas into something like a heatmap above, but starting with data points is probably enough work as it is.
There’s all sorts of various rigs used for night sky photography. Lots of knobs to turn to get the right exposure of the right parts of the sky, but a lot of the coolest pictures also have some foreground thing that is mostly dark but just illuminated enough to show you a bit if what it’s like to be there in person. I tried to do something like this in Joshua tree last time we were there with my phone flashlight. It kinda worked but it was basically impossible to tune and get right because reaction times and I had to be hold my phone so inconsistent angles were happening.
After literally zero research and only vaguely “over hearing” a conversation on an astrophotography channel of a slack group I’m in I had the idea to build an app for an android phone that basically has a tuneable flashlight timer. You’d be able to say “hey I want to flash my phone light for 0.08s this time” or like “flash for 0.1s wait 2sec and flash another 0.1s” or whatever schedule like that.
Some experimentation will be needed to find the lower bound but I think it can be relatively low and some phones (like mine) have multiple bright levels so that would be cool too.
then can setup phone on some consistent angle and stuff and maybe that’ll work.
yeah yeah I know that it’s maybe not gonna work.. my “overhearing” made it sound like consistent very low light is better than faster pulses of higher light but I think it’s worth a shot.. relatively low barrier to entry.
While exploring some other ideas that played around with peltier/thermoelectric effect devices, I had an idea that I think is definitely do-able with my skill level, and could be really cool (heh) and useful. It’s based on this idea: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/169951-wristify-a-personal-peltier-wrist-cooler-that-could-save-the-us-millions-in-energy-costs
Since COVID started, the wife and I have been working from home, and as such we don’t have the nice air conditioned offices that we would at our normal work locations. This has lead to the interesting decision on warmer days… turn on the home A/C and use more electricity (and up our bill), hope a fan and open window can cool us enough, or accept that we’re going to be sweaty and uncomfortable. What if there was another option that worked when it wasn’t quite warm enough to justify the expense and decadence of the A/C, but worked better than a fan and open window to the warm outside? Enter: my idea (based on “wristify” linked above).
What if I could make a little device that went in front of your keyboard that was cooled by a peltier device and used the principle from wristify to make your whole body feel cooler? This would have a slim triangular shape to act as a wrist rest for your keyboard and some sort of thermally-conductive metal surface that would have peltier devices behind it and little fans to help with the heat rejection on the other side.
Basic sketch:
(it helps that the wife and I have the same dell-model keyboard provided by work so a single design will work for both of us)
Some details:
Things still need to work out:
Things to buy to get started:
I had the idea of using a small solar panel and a peltier effect cooler thing to condense water out of the air during the day and just directly feed that into a planter to make a self-sufficient plant waterer. Doing some initial investigation I found that, as usual, my idea was not novel whatsoever. In fact, people have not only discussed it, but they’ve done it.
There are apparently commercial bike-mounted water bottle systems that will refill as you ride and use various air filters to try to keep the water potable once it’s condensed (I’m still not convinced that I’d want to drink such water). Either way, in the investigation I found that the inefficiencies of such a system would either not produce enough water for any size-able plant, or it would need to be larger than I had hoped.. this make me less interested in the project as the benefit doesn’t seem to justify the cost. Of course I could do it just to enjoy doing it, especially considering that I’ve wanted to play with peltier/thermoelectric devices for a while now, but I think I’ll save this as a project I can do if I find myself with extra (otherwise unused) solar/peltier devices, not as something I’ll purchase everything solely for.
One other thing I happened upon in my poking around the internet for the above is that there was some research project that used peltier effect devices fitted to a wrist-band to make people feel cooler overall. The idea was that these devices, while not terribly efficient, were more efficient than cooling a whole room/building when the environment was in the sweet spot of slightly too warm for comfort, but not quite arizona-in-july hot. The research was in the skin contact amounts, on/off cycles to prevent it getting too cold and doing damage to the user, and how these could be used and tuned to stop the need for A/C use in environments where it made sense.
This was a really cool idea to me and lead to two separate ideas that will be explored outside of this post:
A list of ideas/stuff to do thats mostly stand alone:
List to be expanded as new ideas come to me.
I wanna do a cosplay costume of one of the Jaeger’s from Pacific Rim (I guess I could do a gundam too, but there’s way more lore there that I don’t understand so I think sticking to pacific rim is a better idea).
The big thing in this isn’t just the pacific rim look, but I want it to also be an integrated suit of sorts as well. The most common complaint with cosplayers is that the outfits/suits are way too hot. Mix that with DragonCon (Atlanta in SEPTEMBER) and I have a recipe for dehydration levels that not even a boy born and raised in Phoenix has seen and sweat smells that will make my wife tell me to take a separate Lyft back from the con. SO what I want to do is make a suit that uses some sort of cooling tech to cycle cool water around a vest/suit that will help keep me cool. I’m thinking some sort of battery pack-powered radiator or maybe (cooler? heh) thermoelectric coolers to cool things down and effectively a bunch of strategically insulated rubber tubing to cycle water. Maybe I can use a PC liquid cooling pump to move the liquid around.. need to work on it. Play with radiators and thermoelectric coolers a bit. Work on the cooler/water system interface. Work on the cycle system and building it into a vest/suit. Work on a way to fill up the system when it’s off someone and maybe top it off when it’s on? (hopefully it won’t leak?)
The best thing is that because the Jaegers are giant robots, I can have battery packs with LEDs or whatever strapped to my belt like nbd, and maybe even make the cosplay elements (back-mounted flanges, etc) be actual cooling elements and work FOR me.
Can’t forget to account for movement and potential damage that could come while at the con… Maybe want to sneak the ability to put a small backpack together with room for a spare set of clothes or something??
Need to start reading to cosplay forums too I suppose..
Had some more ideas for this after some investigation. I looked into the vest and cooling with thermolectric and all that and got a lot of dead-ends… and thinking more about it, it sounds frought and potentially power hungry (requiring more batteries). Enter an idea I found while contemplating another idea… wristify
What if instead of cooling a whole vest, I could cool a few specific places where it can cool my blood (like the wrist, or maybe armpits if there’s a way to do that comfortably) with less thermoelectric places and less power needs and zero risk of leaks or need for heavy water systems and pumps?
Need to try it out first (maybe with this idea?)… if it pans out then can start investigating where good places would be and how to reject the waste heat effectively in sensitive places like armpits or even in inconvenient places like on the wrist.. Investigation to come (maybe)