I need an idea person.
 

I've always been a software guy. Hardware kind of scared me. I stumbled upon this open-source microprocessor platform, though, called Arduino, and now my mind is running a million miles a minute.

It's basically a motherboard that comes with a very basic programming language to program it. You can go to Radio Shack and buy things like WiFi adapters, GPS signals, motion detectors, thermometers, cameras, light detectors, etc.

So then you can solder those onto the board and program them accordingly. We could trigger events based on things in the atmosphere. These events can be anything available as web services online.

For example, we could send out real-time Tweets or Facebook updates when the temperature in a room falls out of a given range, or when an object starts to move. Imagine packages automatically tweeting or texting the truck driver when they fall off the truck and are left behind.

Some people have made things like cat toys that automatically take pictures and post Tweets in real-time when the toy starts to move (assuming the cat is playing with it).

I've always been big into payments because there's a residual model there...you could give away the product and make a killing on commissions with transactions running through the solution.

I'm having trouble thinking of a practical use-case, though. I mean, I could trigger a payment based on the motion of your tooth brush, or based on pushing your garage door opener, or again, based on temperature in a room, how bright or dark the room is, how fast the thing is moving, where exactly the thing is located in the world, etc.

So, give me an idea, I'll build the hardware, program the software, develop a website for it, etc. and we can make a bunch of money together! If we could come up with a practical use and get a patent on it...we'd kill it.

boobs.

Hmmm...maybe we could implement this to notify my mom when we're running low on hot pockets and mountain dew?

Program it so it will turn your coffee pot on in the morning at a set time.

I have taken your idea and have copyrighted and trademarked it. Please don't speak about it anymore.

They have those already.

Smart fridges are right around the corner. Probably already has patents.

How big is the thing? And I presume it can be mobile for the movement sensing part?

I'd ask Nut.

The standard size is this...

http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploa...o_uno_test.jpg

The parts can be assembled into pretty much anything, though, so it doesn't have to be limited to this form factor, but this would be easiest for me to start with.

I've seen people weaving the parts into clothing and triggering events based on movement or temperature of the clothes.

Very cool, Mr. DRU. There are, no doubt, thousands of applications for some kind of computer device that can automatically detect movement or temperature change.

Restaurants come to mind.

Very exciting, actually.

FAX

With the help of Google, forums, and IRC chat, probably. Not something I'd like to spend my time on, though. Sorry.

Yes, it is. I enjoy playing guitar, too, so I've been thinking of building a little amp or pedal you can enable/disable to automatically trigger events based on specific chords you play or something like that.

It could be combined with offer of some sort at music festivals to get people to come to your stage instead of hanging out a the main stage waiting for their favorite band.

For example, when the band comes on and plays a well known song, it could automatically tweet out people at the event telling them about the offer. Something like discounts on future tickets or merchandise if they are within 500 feet of Stage 6, or some shit like that.

Hopefully that would pull people over there, and then they could make purchases from their mobile device once they're within range and eligible, and that's where we'd make commissions on everything purchased.

So again, that's just another idea that's been floating around in my head, but if I'm going to spend some serious time on something I'd like to really make it worth it.

Can it be linked to location? How would it be different than a GPS? As a market researcher, I think it would be cool to put these on the bottoms of grocery carts or shopping baskets, or bribe shoppers to carry them around, to see what parts of a store produce the most visits and most time.

Make something that prohibits cell phones from sending or receiving texts while the phone is traveling more than 5 miles per hour and sell the idea to lawmakers.

Every time Cassel moves from the bench, it could send a tweet to the Save Our Chiefs followers to start booing.

Absolutely it can be linked to location. It it would use GPS...not try to differ from it. We would just get a little GPS device to solder on to the Arduino board and then program it to output it's location. Then we'd build software (web-based or mobile apps, for example) that would listen for the signals of all the devices and show you where their current location is.

That is a pretty good idea, too. I've actually seen people doing what you said based on things like who all ahs "checked in" via Facebook or some other service. At large events, quite a few people do check in, and then they can be tracked via Facebook apps (or whatever service they're hooked up to) to see the highest traffic places at the show.

Building something to attach to shopping carts that does the same thing probably wouldn't be very difficult at all. We could track the entire shopping path of shoppers and provide data on all sorts of shopping habits.

Could you make an application that could send an email to every chiefs fan the moment Pioli is fired and then another whenwe draft a first round qb.

It would be a "you can give a **** again" message.

That's definitely an interesting concept, but that wouldn't require any extra hardware like Arduino. Something like that could be done with the device itself.

That said, I may have spoke too soon when I gave the example of the device knowing how fast it was moving. That would require some kind of wind or rotational reference. If the device is in a car, moving relative with that car, it wouldn't know it was moving. I'll have to re-think that particular example.

I'm trying to think of the advantages of this over just a thermostat switch or a motion detector. Is it smaller? More reliable? Can those devices not be hooked up to the logic to send a selective tweet or post? It seems like the selling point is converting that environmental change into words, right?

I don't think they need notifications to do that, do they? Sort of a natural reaction at this point.

The trick to something like this is to identify an easy-entry, quickly scalable vertical market, Mr. DRU.

Many good concepts can fail in the early going because resources are spread too thinly over too broad an area.

If I were you, I'd research a particular industry group, identify an existing need/problem/complaint and start there. Once you've gained market share, then you can expand into other opportunities. That strategy also gives you time to work out any bugs and perfect the solution.

It's an excellent idea.

FAX

Easily converting the motion/thermo event into instant, web-centric information seems like an inexpensive solution to a wide range of problems ... at least, to my mind it does.

FAX

The thing I like about this is that it converts to money. Do people go to a particular corner of the store? What percent of people go straight to the clearance rack and then walk out? What parts of the store are destinations that people seek out specifically (that you then place on the other end of the impulse purchases)? If you understand what your customers are doing, you can optimize your store layout to improve time in store and sales.

I'm sure the following itself will do it's job of notifying everything if/when that happens. Not sure that would require any automation.

Not really something that would be based on the atmosphere around the device either. Think temperature, motion, light/dark, etc.

One thing that could be interesting, maybe, is some sort of a device that fits inside the football and provides real-time data on the ducks that Cassel throws.

Time and motion studies take place all the time. And they cost a freaking fortune, too.

FAX

I kind of figured that, and it seems like it would be manual. I'm not sure if anyone has devised an automated solution yet. It sounds like a no.

I talked to a guy once about using RFID chips to do this, and someone else about using GPS. At the time, the GPS wasn't precise enough, though maybe it is now. The RFID guy turned out to be a poseur of epic proportions, so I just fled from him.

It would work the same as an existing thermostat really, so again, I'm just kinda throwing ideas around about what COULD be done, and trying to come up with a practical use-case that makes sense and isn't quite so obvious.

A thermometer could be used like a thermostat if a room, sure, or it could also be used to give real-time feedback on the inside of your BBQ grill, the water in a pool or hot tub, or anything else we could think of.

Just the whole idea of taking a piece of hardware that can return data about itself or what's around it, and then attaching that to the vast number of online services available to developers these days. There are things that have already been doing or would be pretty easy for existing hardware manufacturers to do, but there's SO MUCH data and networking service available online now that haven't been around all that long, so I know there are some interesting things that could be done that aren't being done yet. Just need to put my finger on it.

Here's what you need to build. Look at the price tag, and theres normally a 3 month backlog of orders.

http://www.cyanogen.com/fix.php

Here's the cost page

http://www.cyanogen.com/cloud_buy.php

They sell 2-4000 a year.

The problem with something like that is I don't have thousands and thousand of dollars to defend myself against patent and trademark infringement claims. I'm already the victim of "nuisances lawsuits" where a competing company knows damn good and well they have absolutely no shot at winning the case, but they also know I don't have enough money to defend myself. I'm going through that right now with my GiveMobiley solution, unfortunately.

So, ideally, I'd like to come up with something that isn't directly competing with an existing product.

Use that board to build a device like this. Ive seen people doing it from parts for $50 - 100. then just do what you do best and write the software to record the reading in a simple comma delineated file.

Easy peezy.

This reminds me of http://smartthings.com/... I have a developer license on it's way... as these smart devices are being delivered in Dec...

Motion and geo proximity based smart devices are going to be very popular over the next few years.

I can't say for sure, but it actually looks like those guys are using the Arduino platform. It's open-source (free) and available for people to do exactly that...package it up and provide it to people for a price.

They're probably going to provide developers an easier way to do things with Arduino, which would be great depending on their royalties. Again, everything they're doing in that video (whether it is indeed Arduino or not) is exactly the same as Arduino works. Starting with that basic board housed in their "hub", soldering on extra parts to handle different tasks, and writing software apps to control it all.

I'll have to keep my eye on them. If they provide enough of an improvement over Arduino itself to justify their cost I'll probably use them. Otherwise, I'll just stick with Arduino directly since it's free.

NNNNNEEEERRRDDDD!!!!!!!!!

That would be a cool security system trigger. Play the right chords to unlock the gate.

Make a small robot that will patrol your home. Try to rig sensors in line with biological presence. Change in local temp, sound, vibration, etc. Also include a camera that will take stills when possible biological presence is detected, tweet/text you, with the option of turning on a video/audio stream that you can access. While you are doing this market the intermediate stages as a house pet observation device.

For dieters connect the system to fridge and cupboards door and require X amount of activity using motion detection to trigger the lock and get something to eat.

A networked chicken coop door actuator. A nice iphone front end, too, please.

Suburban chicken keepers will love it.

Route tracking on forklifts in a large warehouse. Use the data to create the ideal WH layout, increasing efficiency.

So far as I know, they're totally manual.

You hire a consultancy who hires a guy who stands around and watches people come in and out of your store. After awhile, they write up a report and suggest you move some stuff around.

Oh, and send you an enormous bill.

That's about it.

FAX

A group in my senior design class is using this in their project. They are designing a system that turns on the humidifiers and heaters in a yoga studio and then maintains the preset temperature and humidity. They have it set up so that the owner can control it all through an iphone app anywhere he has wifi or 3G. Definitely cool technology.

Route tracking already takes place using RFID chips. However, if you could do the implementation significantly cheaper than current implementations you might have something.

The important thing in this type of implementation would be the software in place behind this time study. How would you break down the results to be understandable by the stores? Do you have a consultant that flies around to places helping them understand the raw data they're receiving? Do you have a sortable listing solution that ranks different aspects of the results?

How durable is the technology? If it's placed on a shopping cart it has to be pretty durable to withstand the constant pounding it will be receiving. RFID is going to have problem transmitting the results efficiently and accurately. GPS is generally not quite precise enough for an application like this.

An idea that popped into my head is using the temperature feature of the technology. If you have temperature working in concert with another tracking feature you might be able to narrow it down a bit more. Refrigerated sections will have lower temperatures and most aisles should have different temps especially if it's able to break down by .1 degrees. Pretty simple to track with thermometers around the store and should be easy to integrate into a tracking system.

Step 1: Make it do fart noises.
Step 2: Profit...

Temp and movement changes make me think engines and efficiency.
Also tagged animals for research, on plates in restaurants, on inmates, I'd guess the uses are endless.W

Take your ideas on shark tank~

I have one.
I know they already have remote start for automobiles. How bout one that starts your car when it's cold out and runs the heater for a while, then shuts off. Starts back up when it gets down to a certain temp and would also do the same thing in the summer time when it's extremely hot and runs your A/C to keep the car at a comfortable temperature.

I work with restaurants and it's startling how often they'll have a cooler or freezer go down.
When they do, they lose a lot of groceries. Use this to text the owner when the cooler or freezer temp gets up to a certain temp.

Digital chastity belts. Probably a few big markets overseas.

Already been done...

Why do you post in a .1 font size?

Wow... Farms with enclosed animal housing have had hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on temperature monitoring technology for a decade or better. Tell those restaurant owners to blow some dust off their moldy old wallets and cover their ass.

Midgets and poop.

Quick and easy idea...for alarm systems.

Make x number of machines, that once you leave the perimeter it activates alarms. For example I have a family of four. All 4 have this device in their wallet in whatever way. If none of the 4 devices are in the perimeter alarm is active, if any 1 of the 4 devices are in the perimeter the alarm is dis-activated.