Rex's Ramblings » Bad Ideas

Ethernet-connected dead man’s switch

rfeany — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:37:40 +0000

Take one of those big red switches, add wifi or wired ethernet, webserver and RTC. Use rdate or openntpd or something to sync the clock. Why do all of this? Call it a “I’m running late dead-man’s switch”. Push it in the morning after your shower, or maybe while you’re making breakfast. Slept in? It’ll let your coworkers know you’ll be running late today. If you’re pretty consistant, you could even calculate an estimated time of arrival based on when you pressed it.

Your lights are on!

rfeany — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:27:12 +0000

Take a picture of the license plate with your camera phone and send it to the “your lights are on” website.

The web service OCRs the license place (should be easy, right?) and one-way hashes it. Look up in the database and send a SMS/mail message/automated phone call to the owner.

You would have to register your license plate numbers and preferred method of contact.

Then, when I see your lights on somewhere, I have a way of notifying you. Of course many new cars have auto-light-shutoff features, this maybe is not so interesting. Maybe instead of “your lights are on” it could be “Hey, you’re parked in my spot!” or maybe “Hey, I’m towing your car”. Register your address and I can send you messages like ‘your sprinkler system is broken and flooding your yard’ or something.

The idea is to decouple having to know who owns or operates a thing with sending it a message, while also anonymizing the sender.

Robotic driver

rfeany — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:03:17 +0000

There are quite a few accidents where a driver falls asleep at the wheel, or has some medical problem that causes the driver to loose control of the vehicle. Our technology is not quite good enough for a general autonomous vehicle but certainly it is good enough for an autonomous “slow down, pull over, and stop”. Even if it is not very smart, even if it just slows down in the middle of the freeway with its flashers on, certainly that would be better then veering into a car next to you, or on-coming traffic.Maybe the technology would not be so useful for passenger cars, but could be used effectively in trucks?

Of course all that is probably trivial to do. The hard part? Figuring out if the driver is incapacitated. Dead man’s switch? A camera that watches the driver, and makes sure his eyes are on the road?

How cool would that be, anyway. Monitor head movement and eye position. sound an alarm if you start to doze off.

Falling asleep a the wheel – http://www.drivers.com/article/680/