Big Ideas #13

I've been very interested in these little Roomba robots. The idea that you can turn them on and they'll sweep and mop your floors while you sleep is awesome. My next door neighbor worked for the Weedeater company when they were testing a prototype of a robotic lawnmower. It looked like a big green turtle, was solar powered and would continually cut the grass by following an algorithm. Definately the coolest thing since sliced cheese. It had one serious drawback that the Roomba robots have as well. It could't get into corners and you still had to trim around trees and bushes. The Roomba's brushes that scrub or pickup are in the middle of the machine and since the machine is round like the grass cutting robot, they can't get into corners either. My idea is to make it square or rectangular and move the brushes to the front so that they extend a bit outside the edge of the robot. Then the scrubbing or sweeping motion will also involve not only rotation of the brushes but a sort of orbital motion like that of a palm sander to get all the dirt. Anyone interested in pursuing this, let me know.

Big Ideas #12

With the summer heat right around the corner, my mind has been focusing on air conditioning. For those of you that live where the summers are mild enough that you don't need it, you won't understand how important it is when the temperature is 95 degrees and the humidity is above 75%. I had an idea that a good way to control the high cost associated with air conditioning would be to direct the air conditioning only where it was needed. What I thought would be cool would be to have individual air conditioning units for each room so that only the rooms that needed it would get it. "Wait a minute", you say, "Don't window air-conditioners do that?" Yes, but they're ugly, and not very efficient because they don't usually have a thermostat. What I'm talking about is a unit that would fit in the space above the room and would exhaust the cool air through existing air-conditioning registers. It would, of course, have to be connected to a main compressor (or two) . The compressor(s) would run at a variable rate depending on how many of the individual units were on at the same time and the return air would be fed back to be cooled through a very small aperture rather than the large, single return that you find in current systems. The same system could be used for forced air heating only you'd want the air to come out closer to the floor so that it would heat the room as it rose. It's been proven time and time again that point of use systems save money and are more responsive. Look at point of use water heaters. They product hot water instantly and you don't have a big tank of hot water that you have to keep hot whether you need it or not.
You could even take this to the next level and use an entirely new sort of refrigeration by utilizing Peltier cooling. The technology involved applies current to a coated plate and because of the circuitry involved, the plate has a cold side and a hot side. Blow air past the cold side and you have air conditioning, the hot side, heating.

Big Ideas #11

This time of year where I live, the temperature can vary greatly from day to day and even during the course of the day. It's not uncommon for the high temp to be 75 or 80 with the lows in the 40's. You've got to run the airconditioner during the day because of the humidity and then if you don't remember to reset the thermostat when you go to bed, you'll wake up in the middle of the night, freezing. I had the brilliant idea this morning that thermostats ought to have temperature and humidity sensors outside so that when the outside temperature and humidity reached a predetermined level, the Heating/Air-conditioning unit would respond appropriately. Very often, the temperature will be high but the humidity won't and the airconditioner works overtime trying to get the nearly non-existant humidity out of the air. I know this would be a very simple technical issue and could be implemented with some integrated circuits or even simple computer chip.

Big Ideas #10

My latest idea came about after my wife and a friend of hers went out for a walk last week. The next day the both complained about their allergies and my wife joke that they would have to wear surgical masks when they went out for a walk next time. The little light bulb went off over my head. Why couldn't something like a swimmer's nose plug with filters in them work to keep allergens out of your nose? Even if you breathed through your mouth, I don't think that would be a problem because the allergic reaction is in your nose. I suppose the real challenge would be to make them small enough to fit in your nose without being seen while being large enough not to be inhaled. Also, with atheletes, their nasal cavities expand and you would want one of those things in your lungs. I'll bet there are some people out there in the bio-medical field that can overcome those problems without any trouble at all.