What Tech I Want, I Think (Early 2019)

It has been a while since I've written about a list of current tech items that have caught my eye.  I thought that it might make sense to given that CES 2019 just ended.

What I Want:

1. Humon Hex: it tracks oxygen availability in your muscles (specifically your thigh).  It provides more direct feedback on how hard you are working (which I'd always wanted to know).  Maybe I'm being lazy or just feel tired when my body is capable of doing more - this gives you a much better sense of how true that is.  Cost: ~$300.  Availability: Immediate.
2. Garmin Vector 3 Power Meter: I have gotten used to having legit power meter information from the Stages spin bikes at the Equinox at which I am a member.  Going for outdoor rides now are not as information rich.  I much prefer the outdoor ride (in the right weather), and already have speed and cadence sensors, so this is the next step.  It's a lot of money, though.  Cost: ~ $900.  Availability: Immediate.
3. K'Watch Glucose: A continuous glucose monitoring watch.  It requires a consumable which needs to be replaced every 7 days, but it looks super cool.  I'd love to wear for a couple of months to see how my activities, eating, drinking, working out and all affect my blood sugar levels.  I feel like I'd learn a lot over the first month or two of wearing it.  Maybe not too much after that.  Cost: ~ $150 for the watch, $100/month for the consumable. Availability: Unknown, but hopefully in 2019.
4. LIDAR Lite v3HP: A small 40m range LIDAR from Garmin.  I would love to work this into a Raspberry Pi 3 project to build a small device that would measure speeds on the road in front of me and then post the fastest on a website along with vehicle pictures (with ALPR, ideally) and a graph of the distribution of the speed of cars on the road.  Maybe someday I'll get to this project.  Cost: $150.  Availability: Immediate.
5. Naked Labs Body Scanner: I know I drink too much beer to keep my gut in check, but I think it would be super cool to get a long term view of where fat is being added and removed as you move through time.  So you should have a much better view of the aggregate body fat, and also the view of where it's coming and going from.  Also, you get your weight.  Cost: $1495.  Availability: Q219, I believe.
6. Air Quality Monitor: I'm not sure that Awair is the one, but I would like something that tracked indoor air quality that was inexpensive enough that I could have several of them in my house.
7. A compact point and shoot camera: a successor to my Canon S100.  Not sure what's best out there now, nor what the right amount of money is.  Sometimes, the camera on my phone just doesn't capture the magic.

What I Don't Want

1. MagicLeap AR Eyeglasses: Not until somebody shows me software that matters.  Cost: $2295.
2. 8K TV: Not until most content is 8k.  I bought my current 65" Sharp LCD 1080p TV in 2008.  It's still pretty great.  When it fails, I will buy a 4k TV of similar size (we'll see about OLED).  In fact, I'm rather hopeful that the Samsung modular micro-LED approach gathers some steam and we get some cool options there.
3. Bike head's-up glasses: Way too much money.  Way too early in the product maturation cycle.  Same for a motorcycle helmet head's up display.
4. USB turn-table: Maybe a cool mix of old and new, but I'm not a vinyl guy.  Spotify for me, right now.
5. Glowing alarm clock: My Garmin Forerunner 935 vibrating works just fine.  I wake up at a different time than my wife, so I think that lighting the whole room up would be disruptive.
6. Any voice-activated appliance: I have an Echo Show and I like it.  I just don't feel the need for a microwave that has this built in.
7. Any robot: call me when they are actually useful for more than vacuuming.
8. HTC Vive Pro Eye: but only because I don't have the space to devote to it right now.  Also, having bought the original Vive, I feel like there isn't enough software for it.

If I think of anything more, I'll add to the list.

Flower Power!

A few months back I had written about a desire for a set of in situ monitors for gardens.  I had ultimately found some interesting hobby-based tools that could be plugged together for monitor sunlight and other conditions.  While reading my most recent Macworld, I ran across an ad for the Parrot Flower Power and had to investigate further.

There doesn't seem to be much information on Amazon in terms of customer reviews, despite the fact that the product has been available since October.  There is a grand total of one review.  However, there are reviews out there on the web and they seem to be reasonably positive first looks.  See the reviews on The Australian or Futureshop.

It is intriguing enough that I'll be purchasing one and letting you know how it goes.  Probably can delay this purchase until closer to the spring season when I'll be looking to do some planting in the yard.  At that point, I'll talk about how the tool stacks up to what I was hoping to get in my previous blog post.  Already, I think its reasonable to complain that the information that is being collected won't be mine (i.e., I won't have control of it nor access to it excepting through the Parrot app or website and will be subject to whatever limitations exist).

Solar Insolation Monitor for Gardens

I just cleaned out a garden / pit of weeds and I am ready to put down some landscape fabric and mulch.  Pretty boring, yes, because I don't know what plants would do well in the sunlight / shade mix that this garden has.  This sparked an idea.

While others have come up with homemade solutions to measure solar insolation (basically, how much solar energy is hitting a certain spot), I propose an easy to use tool for landscape architects (and eventually homeowners, when they get cheap enough) to use for this purpose.  If this video or the The Garden Continuum's blog posting is any indication, there is not an existing tool that makes this easy for a would-be landscape architect.

Sunlite Tracker

The basic tool would look like a stake topped by a round half dome.  It would be a rough crystal ball, with small solar panels on each face.  The dome and the stake are separable with a quick twist of the dome.  The general notion is that you'd pop any number of the Sunlite Trackers in gardens around a residence to determine how much sunlight an area gets.  Consequently, one can determine with some accuracy what plants with thrive there.

In my conceived usage, the Sunlite Trackers would be set out for a week and then collected by the landscape architect.  The location of all of the domes would be recorded prior to their removal.  The Sunlite Tracker would record every minute, the amount of incoming solar insolation.  The architect would then pop a USB cable into the dome and download the information about the sunlight measured at the location.  It would be uploaded to the web-based service www.sunlite-tracker.com.  There, the data would be compared to sunlight measurements for the nearest weather station, so it can be normalized on a historical basis.  I think you do not want to rely on a week period that could have just been sunnier than normal to base your planting decisions on.

Then the website would display the set of trees/bushes/flowers that would thrive in those light conditions.  The architect could be confident that the plant recommended will be suitable for a given location.  If using enough of Sunlite Trackers, that confidence could be increased even in areas partially shaded by branches above.

Who should do this?

I think the business model could work like this:

• Landscape nursery signs up with Sunlite Tracker, enters all of their stock available.
• Landscape architect checks out some Sunlite Trackers and places in a customer's garden
• Landscape architect retrieves Sunlite Trackers and orders goods from the landscape nursery
• Landscape architect returns Sunlite Trackers to landscape nursery.

The key, then, is for the landscape nursery to see this as a means of expanding their sales and integrating more closely with their professional buyers - the landscape architects.  I think that I have a bit more to learn about the industry, though, before I declare this approach suitable.

One (or more) Step(s) Beyond:

Here are some ideas for extensions to the basic idea presented above (organized from least complex extension to most complex):

• The website should allow the architect to put in other filtering criteria, such as deer resistance and low maintenance.  This seems perhaps obvious, but many wholesalers have simple PDFs (some password protected to keep out retail customers like me).  I'm thinking something like the search page on Plant Select.
• Though a bit of a technological leap, one could make the stake smart and have it measure the acidity and moisture of the soil that it has been staked into.  While it doesn't seem like the acidity measurements need to be repeated over time, the moisture measurements probably should be.  And then the moisture measurements could also be normalized for the rainfall over the recent period.
• Also, set up the trackers to transmit back to the internet automatically with a mesh-based network of collecting and sharing information in the base tracker, all ultimately going to a Master-tracker that will be plugged into the home-owners wi-fi network.  This way, there is only the setup trip and the collection trip (with all of the processing and preparation done outside of the time spent at the home-owner's house).

Update 2013-07-02:

So it turns out that I'm probably just bad at doing research.  Folks have developed boards that will do this.  There are fairly well developed tools out there.  That said, I still don't think that they system has been put together in a way that would be easy and useful for professionals focused on the landscape design (rather than hobbyists or enthusiasts).

It looks as if what is needed most here is probably some calibration methodologies and software.  The "one-wire" setup appears easy to put together in the field and would have sufficient flexibility to cover a large or small garden setup.  The logging functionality exists, the computer interface, the ability to attach multiple sensors at the same time.  Its all there.

Though I'm sure it sounds terrible to a techie, good packaging around these products would make this equipment truly useful.

Software as Sensor

I am seriously intrigued by the notion of using software as the key enhancement to already existing (and hopefully simple) sensors.  Think already existing video cameras being used in ways that hugely extend their usefulness simply through the use of algorithms to process the image data.  I know I'm a bit late to the party here but, even so, wanted to capture my thoughts.

This line of thinking was driven by seeing a NY Times article (which I can't find now), but perhaps even better than that link is a link to the MIT Website.  Pretty fascinating stuff.  How else could this be extended?  Let's take things One Step Beyond . . . 

Simple extensions (tiny steps):

• Pulse monitoring on Treadmills and Exercise Bikes:  As long as your face is visible to a presumably cheap camera, your pulse should be available.
• Threat Monitoring: TSA, stop scanning us by shooting all sorts of wonderful radiation and start videotaping movement and faces and bodies.  Surely there must be some tell-tale signs of having a gun stuffed in your pants that would be obvious when you are magnifying movement by 100x?  Perhaps there should be separate face, torso and leg video scanners each looking independently for threats.  Perhaps this wouldn't be sufficient, but cheaply additive to existing measures.  Would probably work best if you make people walk at a normal stride for several paces prior to getting to the metal detector.  It seems as if the TSA could easily add some barriers/ropes and a stop line to make this happen.
• Pilot/Driver Monitoring: I think some of these systems are in place already on high-end cars, but this could potentially make it much less expensive to roll-out to our commercial trucking, bus and aviation industries.  Especially when large numbers of people are involved, the vitals of our pilots ought to be monitored.  Eventually (with much experience), roll this out to all cars. Add distracted driver alerts.  These alerts could be triggered not only by texting or email, but also by overly engrossing conversations. 

More complex extensions:

• Body fat measurement:  Maybe I'm obsessed with this one, but it seems to me that all of the measurement technics are pretty terrible.  Either crazy expensive or not super accurate nor descriptive of distribution of fat.  Maybe video isn't necessary here, but still pictures would work.  First thought is to include age, height and weight and then mix some measurements of body parts (including "hard measurements" - places with likely little fat buffering - to get a clean view of the skeletal frame) with pictures of the individual from various angles (i.e., front on and view from every 45 degree increment).  Video would interesting here because presumably you'd get the view from many more angles.  An even further refinement would be to add pictures of the individual with a series of rubber bands on.  These would be applying a known amount of force (pressure on the skin) and thus able to measure the surface squishiness.  Ideally, this results not only in a reasonably accurate aggregate assessment of the individual, but also a view as to the distribution of fat in their body.  Fat mixed among one's internal organs would obviously not be measured easily using this method.  But given that its primarily software driven, I bet a package could be put together (with a digital tape measure) for only $30 or so.  Bonus step: instead of taking stills, take a video and have the digital tape measure slowly retract or tighten (similar to a blood pressure monitor) and calculate the squishiness based on the air pressure.
• 3D Modeling of Objects: Spin an object on a spindle, strip out the spindle and go.  3D scanners already exist and will be a critical adjunct to 3D printing.  Some software scanners also already exist.  Reasonably useful, too, from my exploration.  That said, get your 3D scanner software fast, before some knucklehead tries to prohibit via DMCA or some such nonsense.
• 3D Modeling of buildings: Similar to above, but of "inside" surfaces instead of outside surfaces.  How cool would it be if you could walk through your house with a video camera and make a complete 3D model (think, you are trying to sell your house).  This will happen via consumer grade (think, mobile phone) video soon and at much lower cost than is happening now with complex laser scanners (of crime scenes, for instance).
• Consumer Speed "Trap": Tired of your neighbors driving too quickly down your road?  Set up a camera in your front yard and then process both the license plates and the speed of the car (easily detectible from identification of the make and model - and its interaction with the optics of the particular video camera) by comparing successive frames.  Upload to one of the "bad driver websites".

More to come (maybe).