The Inventions Of Arthur Paul Pedrick

March 14, 2017 by 26 Comments

We hear a lot about patent portfolios when we scan our morning dose of tech news stories. Rarely a day passes without news of yet another legal clash between shady lawyers or Silicon Valley behemoths, either settling spats between multinationals or the questionable activities of patent trolls.

These huge and well-heeled organisations hold many patents, which they gather either through their staff putting in the hard work to make the inventions, or by acquisition of patents from other inventors. It is not often that a large quantity of patents are amassed by any other means, for example by an individual.

There is one prolific individual inventor and holder of many patents though. He achieved notoriety not through his inventions being successful, but through their seeming impracticability while conforming to the rules of the patent system. His name was [Arthur Paul Pedrick], and he was a retired British patent examiner who filed a vast number of eccentric patents from the early 1960s until his death in the mid 1970s, all of which stretched the boundaries of practicality.

His subject matter was varied, but included a significant number of transport inventions as well as innovations in the field of energy and nuclear physics. We wish there was room to feature them all on these pages, but sadly they are so numerous that it is difficult even to pick the selection we can show you. So sit down, and enjoy the weird and wonderful world of [Pedrick] innovations.

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Earth Day: Environmental Sensors

April 22, 2015 by 18 Comments

Before you attempt to solve a problem, you must first study the problem. If there’s a problem with the environment, you must therefore study the environment at a scale never seen before. For this year’s Hackaday Prize, there are a lot of projects that aim to do just that. Here are a few of them:

[Pure Engineering]’s C12666 Micro Spectrometer has applications ranging from detecting if fruit is ripe, telling you to put sunscreen on, to detecting oil spills. Like the title says, it’s based on the Hamamatsu C12666MA spectrometer, a very tiny MEMS spectrometer that can sort light by wavelength from 340 to 780nm.

The project is to build a proper breakout board for this spectrometer. The best technologies are enabling technologies, and we can’t wait to see all the cool stuff that’s made with this sensor.

[radu.motisan]’s portable environmental monitor isn’t just one sensor, but an entire suite of them. The design of the project includes toxic and flammable gas sensors, radiation detectors, dust sensors, and radiation detectors packaged together in a neat, convenient package.

[radu] has already seen some success with environmental sensors and The Hackaday Prize; last year, his entry, the uRADMonitor placed in the top fifty for creating a global network of radiation sensors.

 

Improving A Homebrew CT Scanner With Barium

February 26, 2014 by 22 Comments

CTscanner

[Peter] has been working on his homebrew CT scanner for a while, and it’s finally become something more than a spinning torus of plywood. He’s managed to image the inside of a few pieces of produce using an off-the-shelf radiation detector and a radioactive barium source

When we last saw [Peter]’s CT scanner, he had finished the mechanical and electronic part of the Stargate-like device, but the radioactive source was still out of reach. He had initially planned on using either cadmium 109 or barium 133. Both of these presented a few problems for the CT scanner.

The sensor [Peter] is a silicon photodiode high energy particle detector from Radiation Watch this detector was calibrated for cesium with a detection threshold of around 80keV. This just wasn’t sensitive enough to detect 22keV emissions from Cd109, but a small add-on board to the sensor can recalibrate the threshold of the sensor down to the noise floor.

Still, cadmium 109 just wasn’t giving [Peter] the results he wanted, resulting in a switch to barium 133. This was a much hotter source (but still negligible in the grand scheme of radioactivity) that allowed for a much better signal to noise ratio and shorter scans.

With a good source, [Peter] started to acquire some data on the internals of some fruit around his house. It’s still a slow process with very low resolution – the avocado in the pic above has 5mm resolution with an acquisition time of over an hour – but the whole thing works, imaging the internal structure of a bell pepper surprisingly well.

A Touch Screen Geiger Counter Without A Geiger Tube

September 14, 2013 by 33 Comments

geiger

We’re assuming [Toumal] was desperately bored one day, because in the depths of the Internet he found some really cool components to build a solid state Geiger counter.

The Arduino and touchscreen are rather standard fare [Toumal] picked up on eBay for about $30. What really sets this project apart from all the other geiger counter builds we’ve seen is the solid state geiger counter [Toumal] used. This device uses a specially-made photodiode made by First Sensor to detect gamma emissions from 5 to 1000 keV.

[Toumal] put all the software for his Arduino touch screen radiation detector up on github. To be honest, we’re really impressed with the rad sensor [Toumal] used for this project, so if you ever decide to pick one of those up, he’s got your back with an Arduino library for it.

Turning A Phone Into A Geiger Counter

June 23, 2013 by 10 Comments

geiger

We’re no stranger to radiation detector builds, but [Dmytry]’s MicroGeiger prototype is one of the smallest and most useful we’ve seen.

The idea behind the MicroGeiger comes from the observation that just about every modern smartphone can provide a small bit of power through the microphone jack. Usually this is used for a microphone, but with the right circuit it can be stepped up enough to power a Geiger tube.

[Dmytry]’s circuit uses a hand-wound transformer but keeps the part count low; there’s only a few dozen caps, resistors, and diodes in this build, making the circuit much smaller than the Geiger tube itself.

Since [Dmytry] is powering a Geiger tube with a phone, it only makes sense that he should also record clicks from the tube with an Android app. Right now, the entire project is still in the prototype stage, but everything works and his app can detect radiation from one of [Dmytry]’s sources.

The code and schematics for the MicroGeiger are available on GitHub, with a video of the project in action below.

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PiP-Boy 2000 Build Goes For Function Over Form

April 24, 2012 by 14 Comments

 

[Daniel] wrote in to tell us about his PIP-Boy 2000 prototype. While most PIP-Boy remakes we’ve seen tend to be focusing more on the aesthetic side, like a prop, [Daniel] is attempting to make a functional one. He has included a GPS sensor, RFID reader,  and radiation detector in his build but did choose to stick with the familiar PIP-Boy visual theme in the menus. He has a very long way to go if he wants it to do everything the PIP-Boy from Fallout did, but his list of semi-functional features is growing steadily.

Currently there are the basic functions of:

  • automapping and waypoint navigation
  • external PC interface
  • inventory status and item recognition (using RFID)
  • player experience (adds experience as you go to new locations)
  • ambient radiation
  • screensaver

Let us know when you get that sucker to stop time [Daniel]

Weekly Roundup 1/28/12

January 28, 2012 by 1 Comment


Another week has passed and it is time to review the best of what hit our blog in the past week.

In first place is a repeat from last week showing how you can turn an Android device with a CMOS camera into a radiation detector.

In first place if we ignore repeats is a post about how the Raspberry Pi board can decode 1080p video! We’re just itching to get our grubbly little hands on some of these guys when they are finally released.

Up next is a project from one of our own. This week [Brian Benchoff] put up a post about how he built a manifold clock after seeing a similar project on Kickstarter.

Following that is a post showing how you can overlay video onto an encrypted HDMI signal. The MPAA would probably like to crack [bunnie] over the knuckles with a ruler for this one but he actually isn’t decrypting anything. Instead, he is encrypting the overlay and just replacing the normal video with it.

We like this next one a lot because it not only is a nice hack but it allows you to subtly control what can and cannot happen around you. Specifically, you can jam remote control helicopters with this device. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to pair this up with a TV B Gone to keep people from turning the TV back on once you have wrought your mischief.

Finally, another really neat one for you. In this post, we show [Sprite_tm’s] radio transmitter that is composed out of two button cell batteries, two lengths of wire and an ATtiny processor. It is amazing that this even works but with the right tools, a good hacker can do just about anything.