OSCAR: Delayed

Brief note: I was not able to complete the Oscar project by Dorkbot on March 11. I did not set aside enough time to work on the project, especially given the compact timeline and my inexperience with microelectronics. I hope to have more on this soon.

OSCAR: The Announcement

I've decided I will at least take a shot at building a robot for Dorkbot 28 which is being held at Austin Music Hall in Austin on March 11. I will be building a robot codenamed "Oscar" to show off and get feedback on.

I plan on documenting various pieces of the build on this blog, so stay tuned for interesting stuff!

RANDOM: How Progress Happens

Random train of thought as I was driving in to work today.

I've said before that I think profit is the enemy of innovation. Companies invent, but want to hog all the profit for themselves, so they apply for patents and copyrights, preventing other people from copying and possibly improving on their product.

However, I took that thinking a step further. If you want to invent and innovate, you need funding. Where do you get that funding?

Off the top of my head, there are three possibilities:

- Donations
- Profit from unrelated product(s)
- Profit from previous innovation

So it looks like profit is a necessary evil when it comes to innovation.

IDEA: Sample Store

One thing that irks me about grocery shopping is the temptation to try something new. To do so, you usually need to buy a lot of the product, as that's the smallest size it comes in, and if it's not to your liking, are you going to return it?

Additionally, I sometimes want to compare flavors or varieties of products side-by-side to see which one I prefer more. However, the only available option is usually to buy a box of each flavor and take your changes.

Hence, the Sample Store. A store that encompasses both of these ideas in mind. It allows for samples of anything requested, and allows for side-by-side comparison.

Now, funding for such a venture may not be simple. More popular items could be cost-effective in that you buy a pack and quickly go through it in the course of sampling. However, some new and/or exotic products would likely be negative ROI, so those would need to be specially ordered, likely at a premium cost.

Then there's how to charge the customers.

A quick thought on this branch of thinking. It might be worth it just to have a bank of snack machines with individual packages of more popular products for people to sample as they wish.

Other ideas for funding this kind of venture are beyond my knowledge and experience, but the main goal would be to make the experience less painful than having to buy a large amount of food that you end up not eating due to a difference of opinion on taste

CODING: Add "compare" to "get" and "set"

For the coders out there, you may be familiar with C#, and how it includes "get" and "set" functions. I was thinking there should be a third function called "compare". Many times in code, I need to know if a value matches what an object has in a property. Rather than using "get" and writing extraneous code over and over, why not a simple "compare"?

Example:

tempvar = object.property.get()
if (tempvar = comparevar) ...

if (object.property.compare(comparevar)) ...

It probably gets more complicated than that, but you get the idea

IDEA: Simpler interconnectivity for easier communication

It occurred to me that half of the mess of development of technology has to do with interfacing with legacy or proprietary systems. In light of this, I think it would be optimal for everyone to come to a consensus on what is the more efficient way to communicate (a la World Wide Web Consortium), and everyone develop around that. Legacy and proprietary interfaces would come at a premium to work with.

Some parts of this have already come to fruition, including XML.

IDEA: Humans as brain cells

Let me quickly guide you through my thinking before I start in. I was pondering Leonardo da Vinci, and how he created while cutoff from outside influences(1). Then I moved forward to today, where the Internet connects a lot of the world (if not most). Yet innovation proceeds, almost at an equal pace with da Vinci.

That's when I thought of something. What if humans with a connection to each other could mimic a human brain? Imagine a brain as diverse as or more diverse than our own. This might be the next leap in evolution.

(1) I don't know if he was actually mostly cut off from outside influences; I have yet to do actual research. My sources are Wikipedia and a video game with a rendering of one of his studios.