What if we regulate batteries even more? i.e. what if, in some magical perfect world, the world get's together and agrees on batteries for phones like how we agree on AA,AAA,D,C batteries? Even more though.. a standard connector, a standard comms bus, a variety of sizes, and they were designed for reuse as efficiently as possible.
Now we can scale up volume, swap them out, be free to purchase from a different manufacturer, and have scaled up recycling services.
My mother is living alone in her house and we are getting to the point where she might not be able to live alone. I built "Still Kicking", a picture frame that monitors her motion and sends back basic reports and can detect falls and sleep quality to a phone app, to help give her more time at home.
It's just an mmWave sensor connected to an ESP32. But it works nicely, and I'm thinking of starting a company making them, though I'm not clear if the elderly would be ok with this minimal (no camera) intrusion.
It would just work out of the box.. the real one would have a small cell modem so it wouldn't need any networking setup, and it would act as a gateway if you have more than one in a house. There are industrial versions of this for nursing homes. This would be a bit more warm and fuzzy for home use.
I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
But make climate control 3 knobs: Fan speed + off, temperature and output ports. Put the AC button inside the temperature knob, and the 'recirculate' button inside the output ports knob.
With the radio have a push on/off volume knob that starts up at the SAME volume as always (i.e. relative, not absolute) and NOT the previous volume. The volume knob should have some resistance to it. Opposite that have a tune knob for precise tuning, and pressing that gets you into setup and navigates you through it. This should have the same resistance, but the outside has some indents so you know it's not the volume knob.
Have 6 preset buttons and 3 'banks' with a single 'next bank' button. pressing and holding a preset will save it with a beep for confirmation.
On the steering wheel: up/dn for radio should be seek, not next/previous preset. There are 6 nice big buttons for presets but when traveling seek up/dn is the main way we change music.
On the door have the rear view mirror controls, and above that have a knob for dashboard light brightness.
I biked around the US for 1.5 years, and loved every minute of it. Initially I had a hammock (Hennessey) and then a 1 person tent. Lived at a whitewater rafting company, was invited into a music festival, and was invited into people's homes and fed 2-3 days a week.
I stopped to do the family thing, but gearing up to take them on bike trips soon.
Used QNX for an audioserver.. got MP3 encoding and playback ported to it. Visited the headquarters and Dan Dodge instructed his team to help us in any way we needed it.
We needed the help. Thank you Dan!! We eventually ported to linux about 6 years later, but you helped our startup get up and going.
I work in Oceanography.. The solar panels on individual buoys also get cleaned by rain, and can work ok vertically because of reflections. We have special diode bypass panels made so if 10% is covered in poop (SeaLion poop in our case) only 10% of the power is reduced.
Our biggest problem with small wind turbines on buoys is fishingpeople throwing line into them.
I agree - also an EE - and I think it is similar to 'programming music' packages like Sonic Pi. If you are used to reading and writing standard music coding will be an odd and difficult change.
Right now we have a comfort for seeing the layout and such physically, and since that is how we manufacture it this is going to be an output anyway, but there is some future world where it is all put together automatically within the requirements we specify and we have an entirely new way of designing circuit boards.
Each component would come with not only a footprint but an array of basic design implementations that would mix and match with others.. autorouting on steroids of sorts.