Project ideas

Last night I dreamt of a tiny bread machine, just big enough to make a single kruidnoot (a biscuit roughly the size of a coin), complete with a tiny bag of mix.

Sometimes nudity is censored with mosaic pixels (because the world would apparently end if we ever saw a female nipple). Those pixel mosaics always remind me a bit of a QR code. So why not replace them with actual QR codes? These could even link to the original image, which obviously defeats the censoring—and is therefore absurd and hilarious (at least in my head).

Some electric vehicles have vehicle-to-grid functionality, essentially turning your EV into a mobile power socket. My motorcycle doesn’t have that, so I was wondering if I could make it myself. Being able to plug in your kettle on a picnic sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

What I know about fast-charging EV batteries is that the charger performs a handshake before connecting directly to the battery. So wouldn’t it be possible to send the appropriate signals and have the battery terminals exposed on the charger socket? From there you could connect an inverter and get your mains output. But if it's only for a kettle, you might as well hook it up directly to the 300Vdc from the battery. I find it funny to be using the charge plug for dis-charging instead.

When you're queuing in front of a traffic light, don't you find it annoying when your turn signal blinks at a slightly different rate from the car in front of you? There’s even an XKCD about this. But fear no more — the turn-signal sync-o-matic is here. Or at least, the idea of one is.

It should be perfectly possible to use a simple, low-resolution camera with a view of the car in front, isolate its turn signal, and adjust the frequency of your own indicator to match.

And for modern cars that already have cameras on board, it could be as simple as a software update.

More and more things are USB-powered, and USB Power Delivery can supply quite a lot of power these days. Would this be enough to charge my electric motorcycle? There are no USB-PD-powered inverters around yet, but that is probably only a matter of time. It might even be possible to build a fast charger that outputs battery voltage directly.

Would it be possible to remake the iconic children's toy in which the square peg intentionally does not fit in the square hole, but only in the round one? And the other way around? Teaching children (and adults) to think outside the box, instead of obediently following the rules.

After watching old James Bond films, with revolving number plates on his car, I realised that a modern-day Q would simply use e‑paper. Doing so would almost certainly be illegal, I expect, as such plates would be very easy to change indeed. But I couldn’t resist searching the web, and was amazed to discover that not only can you buy e‑paper number plates online, but they’re even street-legal in California!

Taking a bike on the train costs money, whereas taking a folding bike is free of charge. The definition of a folding bike is simply a bike that can be folded. So I could just cut my bike in half, weld in some hinges, and have a bike that travels for free with me on the train. This trick might only work in the Netherlands, though.

In a wave of nostalgia, I wondered what my website would look like in an old browser. I imagined creating a web proxy that scales the display to the resolution used in 1999, fakes a Windows 98 background with a Netscape icon, and generally simulates the 1999 browsing experience. It could slow the connection to modem speed, show a dial-in window, and maybe even play the modem sound.

But it turns out OldWeb already exists.

What would a modern-day Ouija board look like? To begin with, I think the letters should be arranged in a QWERTY layout instead of alphabetical order. It should also be USB-powered and have at least one LED. Perhaps it could include some of the symbols commonly found on a modern keyboard, such as emojis — the dead you’re trying to contact will increasingly be using those.

The board could be turned into a keyboard or an absolute pointing device, Wacom-tablet style, using the planchette as a mouse. It might even be possible to drive the planchette itself using magnets.

When I read on The Register that a Harry Potter magic-wand infrared TV remote control had come out, my mind immediately began bubbling with possibilities. I wanted to build one, of course, but there are all sorts of entertaining things you could do with a magic wand. If you included, say, a microcontroller with Bluetooth, you could use it as a remote control for giving presentations.

However, as prototypes are generally a bit clunkier than the finished product, it would never fit inside such a slim staff. So what sort of enclosure would be suitable for housing a prototype and getting started with the motion sensing? Then the idea popped into my head that I could build it in an empty vibrator casing. It would have roughly the right shape and far more space inside.

I could clearly picture myself waving the prototype about in front of the TV and having to explain to everyone that it was just the remote control. I found this image hilarious — even more so if the prototype turned out to be tiny and would have fitted into a wand after all.

When you look at it, a DIP-8 IC does resemble a little bug. Why not add some wings and antennae and turn it into a sculpture? It certainly fits the "That could have been done with a 555" meme.

With modern doorbells capable of playing any sound you put on an SD card, wouldn't it be hilarious to record myself saying "ding dong" and use that as the doorbell sound? That would be even more low-tech than using the old-fashioned ringing phone sound on a mobile.

But then I read that composer Philip Glass has a clock that plays samples of someone saying "boing".

Back in 2001, MP3 was the music format of choice. It worked well on computers, but few affordable portable players existed. I had just picked up a Game Boy — which was very uncool at the time — because I had always wanted one, and they were dirt cheap (I paid 4 euros). Turning an uncool Game Boy into a very cool MP3 player sounded like exactly the kind of statement I wanted to make.

By itself, the Game Boy is not fast enough to decode the MP3 format, but it has everything else: buttons, screen, batteries, speaker, and headphone amp. There is even a pin on the cartridge connector wired directly to the audio amplifier, so cartridges can play sounds as well as the Game Boy itself.

Then the VLSI Solution VS1001 came out: a single-chip MP3 decoder and DAC. With one of these, it would be possible to make a Game Boy play MP3s. Simply put the VS1001 in a cartridge along with an SD card for MP3 storage and an EEPROM for the Game Boy software.

My project never saw the light of day, but I later discovered that in that same year the SongPro MP3 cartridge for the Game Boy was released.

I could still be the first to turn a Game Boy into a portable movie player, though.