spoon

3 Articles

Parkinson’s Spoon Uses Control Theory For Good

December 6, 2020 by 18 Comments

When we first saw [Barqunics’] design for a self-stabilizing spoon for people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, we wondered how well something like that could work. But take a look at the video below and you’ll see this does a fine job of responding to the user’s hand movements and keeping the spoon perfectly level through a wide range of motion.

There’s at least one commercial product that attempts to stabilize a spoon in the same way so that people suffering from that affliction can retain a measure of independence. This shows that you don’t need injection molding and factory made boards to prove the concept. An MPU6050 provides sensor information and two servo motors control the spoon using PID control.

PID — short for proportional, integral, derivative — is a way to adjust something to a desired point. For example, consider trying to heat a cup of water to 95 °C. If you simply turn the heater on full blast until you get to 95 °C, the water will actually get hotter because you’ll overshoot. Using PID, the amount of heating provided will depend on how far off you are now (proportional), how far off you’ve been over the long term (integral), and how much change you’ve effected recently (derivative). The same algorithm works for spoon-balancing and many other types of controls.

This isn’t the first bootstrapped assistive spoon project we’ve seen. We even looked at the commercial version, awhile back.

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Adaptive Spoon Helps Those With Parkinson’s

January 9, 2019 by 6 Comments

There are a lot of side effects of living with medical conditions, and not all of them are obvious. For Parkinson’s disease, one of the conditions is a constant hand tremor. This can obviously lead to frustration with anything that involves fine motor skills, but also includes eating, which can be even more troublesome than other day-to-day tasks. There are some products available that help with the tremors, but at such a high price [Rupin] decided to build a tremor-compensating utensil with off the shelf components instead.

The main source of inspiration for this project was the Liftware Steady, but at around $200 this can be out of reach for a lot of people. The core of this assistive spoon has a bill of material that most of us will have lying around already, in order to keep costs down. It’s built around an Arduino and an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit with two generic servo motors. It did take some 3D printing and a lot of math to get the utensil to behave properly, but the code is available on the project site for anyone who wants to take a look.

This project tackles a problem that we see all the time: a cost-effective, open-source solution to a medical issue where the only alternatives are much more expensive. Usually this comes up around prosthetics, but can also help out by making biological compounds like insulin directly for less than a medical company can provide it.

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Wifi Antenna

Simple Directional WiFi Antenna

January 19, 2015 by 45 Comments

Back in 2007, [Stathack] rented an apartment in Thailand. This particular apartment didn’t include any Internet access. It turned out that getting a good connection would cost upwards of $100 per month, and also required a Thai identification card. Not wanting to be locked into a 12-month contract, [Stathack] decided to build himself a directional WiFi antenna to get free WiFi from a shop down the street.

The three main components of this build are a USB WiFi dongle, a baby bottle, and a parabolic Asian mesh wire spoon. The spoon is used as a reflector. The parabolic shape means that it will reflect radio signals to a specific focal point. The goal is to get the USB dongle as close to the focal point as possible. [Stathack] did a little bit of math and used a Cartesian equation to figure out the optimal location.

Once the location was determined, [Stathack] cut a hole in the mesh just big enough for the nipple of the small baby bottle. The USB dongle is housed inside of the bottle for weatherproofing. A hole is cut in the nipple for a USB cable. Everything is held together with electrical tape as needed.

[Stathack] leaves this antenna on his balcony aiming down the street. He was glad to find that he is easily able to pick up the WiFi signal from the shop down the street. He was also surprised to see that he can pick up signals from a high-rise building over 1km away. Not bad for an antenna made from a spoon and a baby bottle; plus it looks less threatening than some of the cantenna builds we’ve seen.