Inventor’s Notebook

This is a catalog of all the ideas I’ve come up with and made varying degrees of progress prototyping, from none to “hey, this might work.” If you want to produce them, be my guest. I’ll be happy with any level of involvement, from none to partnership, but a minimum of a mention would be nice.

Before the ideas, let me offer the stages of all new ideas:

1. “That’s so impossible it must be frivolous.”
2. “It’s too expensive so it will never work.”
3. “OK, if I have to I’ll make it but it will ruin my own business, making buggy whips.”
4. “Hey, this makes us all happier, richer, and more comfortable. I’m glad I thought of it.”

My UPCs

Here’s an idea for a phone app that can invert the business paradigm between buyer and seller.

1. After going to a store — let’s use Walmart as an example — you have a paper receipt in your hand. You open the app and use its function that lets you take a photo of the receipt.
2. The app finds all of the UPC codes in the receipt… the things you bought. This is simple optical character recognition (OCR). It’s been in software for 30 years or more now. Because receipts are machine printed and UPC codes are orderly, they process should be highly accurate, even though receipts are often printed faintly.
3. The app accumulates your UPC codes over time and has a list of what you buy. It can categorize them (home/clothing/food), and let you specify your buying frequency, such as “razor blades: monthly.”
4. Now here’s the magic — the part you can’t possibly accept yet, like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and so on. People and companies that sell stuff — the stuff on your UPC list — use a website to find people who buy what they sell, and THEY SEND YOU THE LOWEST PRICE THEY CAN OFFER ON THE PRODUCT! If, for instance, they happened to purchase 10,000 too many hula hoops and you just wore out your twelfth hula hoop this month, they will find you! And they did the shopping, not you! Get it?

Now here’s where you start imagining all the reasons this is impossible, can’t be done, won’t make money, will hurt your business. (I don’t want them knowing what I buy; perishables are challenging; frequency is tricky.) Or not.

Maybe after this gets rolling the folks who under-engineered UPC codes will start to embed into them fully qualifying information, such as color, size, material and so on. For instance, one UPC code apparently is used for all sizes of a particular clothing garment; those days are numbered. (Ha, ha.)

Sidewalk Zamboni

Imagine a riding lawnmower, one of those new ‘zero-turning-radius’ things, but instead of cutting grass it’s got a pressure washer spraying underneath, and a vacuum to suck up the water, clean it, and reuse it.

Kinetic Water Sculptures

Solar and wind-powered, moving waterworks for the eyes. Some day.

Belly Bike, or “The Abdominable Bicycle”

Sort of perfected the sliding transmission, but decided that 2 wheels will never work. Will have to use 4.

Since about 1985 I’ve been trying to make a bike that made sense. You see, when I look at bicyclists I see only ‘feasibility’ not ‘design.’ And what, you must certainly be wondering does he mean by that?! He means that most manufactured products take their form not by what is the best design for their intended purpose, but by what is easy — or even possible — to manufacture. And bikes are probably a poster child for feasibility winning over purpose. My original objection was that bikes only use our legs. Not our arms. But as the years — and my failed prototypes — rolled on, my interest and focus changed from arms to bellies… because I did something simultaneously regrettable and inevitable; I got older. So, somewhere around 2010, after my first prototype that had a crank above the handlebars, I changed my modus operandi to making what can only be called a ‘prone bike.’ Go ahead and Google it, but make sure to tap the ‘Images’ filter; I’ll wait here. I don’t have any photos of that 1985 beginning, but here’s what’s happened since then.

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve simply found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Tricycle. Abandoned.

Pivot off of the front wheel. Too unstable.

First attempt at sliding transmission. Abandoned.

AHA! After 35 years someone else 1) knows that prone exercise is the ONLY solution to the human weight/fitness problem, and 2) determined as I did that only 4 wheels will work!!! I’m not nuts after all. Well I’m probably nuts, but my bike idea isn’t the proof of it.

Adjustable Turn Signal Clicker Volume

Isn’t it long overdue that you can set the volume of the audible click that our automobile turn signals make? And that the visible signal is projected on the windshield (also for high beams)?

Hockey Skate Tighteners

Ice hockey skates are a literal pain to tighten, even when putting them on initially, not just trying to make them tighter after wearing them for a while. It’s always cold, the friction burns your fingers, and it’s difficult getting the tension right at each spot on your skate. In a few years, they’ll abandon the traditional laces and probably go to the ratcheting mechanism of ski boots, but so far they haven’t made that step. Why? Probably various excuses about the technology not being good enough for the war-like environment of hockey… but also fear of looking less than 100% macho. And everyone knows that ratcheting mechanisms are the first sign of weakness. So I’ve tried a few things, and learned how to have things 3D printed along the way. Here’s where I got to after three versions of 3D printing. This concept is based on using Kevlar laces and twisting them with this mechanism after you tighten them just snugly, not under much tension.

Hockey “Shooter Tutors”

The various things you put in an ice hockey goal when one of your lame-ass goalies fails to show up are a poor substitute for even a lame-ass goalie. I made these welded iron pockets that are oriented like the gaps in a goalie’s coverage. They’re 3/4" square steel tubing, with a hard rubber back panel, and goal netting, creating a pocket about 6" deep.

Both targets in position

Detail showing a target up close

Vertically Stacked Airport

Hmmm. Must have a picture somewhere. Imagine if you …

1. Drove your car into a twenty-level underground parking garage, with automated empty-spot routing.
2. Took your luggage out and maybe put it on a conveyor belt right behind your car’s trunk (a camera records your appearance, car, and license plate… or maybe a roving attendant does so with a body cam as they barcode your bags before they go on the belt). This whole “bag-person-explosives problem has got to be made moot in the future… maybe when they perfect electronic sniffing… or no one ever brings bags(?).
3. You go up to the plane’s gate (seating area) which is above the plane, which in turn shelters the airplane from the elements while the plane sits.
4. And when it was time to board you went almost DIRECTLY down one level into the plane’s door.

If only the dearly departed Walt Disney designed an airport. This is a great example of the inadequacy of either government or private enterprise working in isolation; only public-private synergy can solve this level of problem. Hybrids always win (Bellis’s Law).

Solar-Powered Commercial Freight Rail System

1-Billion Barrel Oil Saving

The best inventions have no physical presence, just an idea. Have the US Postal Service deliver mail to only HALF its route on alternate days, totaling 6 days per week. They’ll travel half the distance and save almost half the total post office gas expense.

Meeting Coasters

Fail.

Remote Tree Surgeon

Stop laughing. It actually works but needs another refinement. You should see the drill I have this sucker hooked up to.

Better Beach Bag

Got to prototype stage with a beach bag that solved a lot of they nuisances:

1. Zippable, covered top
2. Straps with clasp to lock around chair
3. Mesh pockets inside and out
4. Key lock
5. Zippered inside pocket
6. Pen and pencil holder on outside
7. Pocket for phone/charger with hole for cord to outside

Nothing dramatic, just all the right design features.

Utensil Holder

Sticking them in a big jar just doesn’t seem like the best we can do.

Ambient Energy Generator

Years ago I had this idea that we could capture energy from the daily temperature change from day to night. Over the years, the idea started to focus on hanging a long cable vertically from perhaps a tree, and putting it under tension… then generating some circular motion one way or another from its daily change in length.

Years passed. They always do. Along the way I posted a question to some “ask a physicist” site or similar… “Can we capture energy this way?” or even more specifically I think it was, “Can someone who is smart enough quantify for me the total amount of this energy, so I could determine if it was even worth capturing.” (I’m pretty sure I would have regarded it as a certainty — a fait accompli[?], that we could capture the energy. I’m no physicist, but I ain’t dumm.) I was a bit shocked when the first and instant reply essentially laughed me off the site, meaning I think they retracted my post as if frivolous. Then another poster chimed in that my question did not justify such rejection. And that’s the last I recall of the whole matter. Never checked for it again. Perhaps now, 5(?) years later I’ll try to look it up. There’s only so many internet hours in the day.

Skip ahead a few years and, one day, I notice that the plastic gas jugs in my garden shed have this habit of puffing up pretty dramatically in the hot weather. I immediately — meaning within about a year — made a contraption to try to turn the diurnal expansion of a volatile-liquid-vapor in a plastic jug into the rotational energy in a flywheel. I had to look up how gun triggers are made and tried to copy that. I was surprised to learn that they’re not as “sure-fire” as I’d hoped… just a balance between friction and pressure. Whatever.

I haven’t quite gotten it to work, but knowing I was just down to the last little bit of mechanics, I haven’t been in a hurry… plenty of other things that desperately need completing, like remote tree surgeons etc. But I did search the web again and look for any progress on the matter. And lo-and-behold, look who had the same idea! Wow, could what I’m thinking be possible?

System draws power from daily temperature swings

And here it is, my post to StackExchange: Physicist…

My March, 2015 Question to StackExchange>Physics

Still just one answer and one reply. So, my new post:

I am re-requesting that someone try to answer my question after now seeing that MIT has done exactly what I posited, extracting energy from diurnal temperature gradient, 3 years after my post:
http://news.mit.edu/2018/system-draws-power-daily-temperature-swings-0215
My question might not have been perfect, but it was not about the specific matter of water. It is whether someone who knows the numbers can answer, is it “enough power to be useful?” TLK has stated ‘not highly practical or cost efficient’ but I think that’s in the context of my example (water, oceans, and ice). Since my original post, I’ve been looking at a vessel filled with just a little bit of volatile liquid, specifically the polypropylene gasoline jugs in my garden shed. Until someone provides the numbers, I will simply remind myself of the stages of all new ideas:
4 That’s impossible.
3 It’s too expensive.
2 It will undermine my own personal interests.
1 OK, we’ll do it.

Cream Saver

Wouldn’t it be nice if , after you buy a pint of cream but only use 1/4 cup, you could save the rest for a month? You can, if you can force the air out. I’ve been trying to buy just the right collapsible ‘bottle’ to do it. Maybe I’ll plunk down the money to have someone on Alibaba make the right adjustments to me. Or I’ll just through a bunch of hundred-dollar bills in the air.

Vandalism Camera In-A-Box

Put …

1. a cell phone — one of those millions of old iPhone 3/4/5's — with
2. a pay-as-you-go SIM card and
3. a 10,000 milliamp lithium battery, in
4. a waterproof box, and use
5. motion-sensing camera software like http://www.presencepro.com’s,

and you should be able to have a pretty decent little business helping people whose mailboxes are smashed by otherwise idle-handed teenage boys who have nothing better to do.

I got it to work well enough — on wifi, not pay-per-call SIM card — to see that the little hole in my front yard is visited by chipmunks, not mice… and to get live footage of three little baby robin chicks in a nest on our backyard trellis.

Didn’t get as far as figuring out how to autoconnect the cell phone to transfer the video real-time. Might require making an app, or getting a feature added to an existing motion-sensing app.

Tree Shoes

Shouldn’t you be able to just climb right up a tree with welded brackets that use your body weight to wedge against the tree? Of course, I’m imagining this while looking at an 8-inch diameter tulip poplar tree that goes up 40 feet before there’s a single limb. Something like this with your boot securely held?

Ouch, someone’s already been there, done that, the Renhan company, apparently… from Amazon:

Darn, all the good ideas are already taken. I really gotta remember to Google everything before I start drawing. Very elegant, uses a bit of a twisting pressure, makes sense.