The Smart Pen

Smart pen

“Ugh. You mean I have to press down on the pen’s button to open it? Gross.” In this day-and-age when we can swipe on our phones and do voice recognition, there seems no reason we should have to press a button. How antiquated. So [Marek Baczynski] modernized his pen for swiping and voice control. It’s also sure to get all the kids back to working on their penmanship.

Seriously though, not all hacks have to be serious. [Marek] and [Ghlargh] added a servo to activate the button, and then [Marek] added Bluetooth to control the servo. After writing a phone app, he was able to swipe down to open it and down again to close it. Then, after some prompting from Redditers he added voice control from his laptop. We think he could have done a more professional job with the way he attached the pen to the laptop, perhaps he could have 3D printed something instead of just using tape, or maybe made something using CNC or a laser cutter. An important hack such as this deserves as much. Now he need only say “Computer. Open pen.” and the tedious task is taken care of. Seeing is believing so check it out in the video below.

We’ve seen [Marek]’s creativity here before in the form of his lightbulb changing drone and self driving potato. We can’t wait to see what great contribution to society he makes next — and by that we mean something that makes us chuckle.

22 thoughts on “The Smart Pen

  1. I don’t understand this. Is he really writing HIMSELF? Doesn’t have an app for that?
    I think he should ductape the pen to a 3d-printer head so that he can have an app issue commands to write on paper. That would make this hack more useful than having to MANUALLY write on paper. Meh. How 2016.

    :-P

  2. Sigh … still waiting for the mobile app driven IoT toilet flusher. lol

    But more seriously I should go learn how to write the smart phone apps.

    Any tips?

    PS: The IoT toilet flusher app would be a very good thing for personal hygiene in public areas if you fix the problem with the toilet door as well.

          1. “naw, just white folks. everyone else and brits of any color are always guilty.”

            I say. Steady on there old boy. You’ll have the SJWs after you. And believe me, that won’t be a pleasant experience.

  3. I can’t imagine pen click duels on this setup… yet. Having to continuously shout “open pen! close pen!” at the app and then the app must do voice recognition to filter out your opponent. And still manually pushing the button would be faster. But then you can tweak the app to push the button as fast as possible for you.

        1. It does seem a bit pointless if you’ll forgive the unavoidable pun.

          I shall withhold judgement on the ‘pen click duels’ as I have no idea what they are and absolutely no intention of looking it up.

  4. It is perfect for those millions of paper pushing bureaucrats. They can now employ a pen pusher to take over that task and relieve them of the stress thus allowing them at least one extra days holiday per annum. The union would of course, dictate pens per pen-pusher ratio thus opening up a whole new area for employment.

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