Saturday, July 19, 2014

The child in each of us, and Toys R Us for tech-happy adults.

There are racing cars, racing boats, even lawn mower racing (leaving the blades on might thin the herd). Can you envision the John Deere factory team in intense competition with Toro?

Go-kart stuff, we have that in Ramsey.

Now, putting aside privacy worries being publicly discussed concerning private drone use possibilities, there are toys on sale now, that way, as this is written, presently costing more than a decent laptop computer these days, and capable of easy inept destruction.

Suggesting as a counter-destructability answer, putting all those flying bot toys each inside a buckyball structure, as in one Swiss experimenter's implementation, here, this image below, with the thought that the buckyball crash tolerance layer might even include chicken wire or its equivalent to lessen bird strike damage, to hardware, and to the birds.


How that would affect the absolutely essential purpose of owning one of the things, piloting it remotely to get a birdseye view of one's neighborhood and home and area, might mean camera optics adaptations would be needed, with chicken wire inappropriate by the camera ports, but conceptually a crash-resistant toy likely would be better as a purchase answering some basic toy-lust outcry of the child in each of us.

And what's your judgment, own a flying drone, or would you rather own a racing lawn mower [wholly specialized, w/o blade, not suited for routine lawn maintenance]?

___________UPDATE____________
On the serious side of things such a device, properly handled, could be helpful via GPS capability in surveying and in county GIS use for terrain tope mapping that might identify wetland zones within planning areas, while avoiding overhead utility wiring by launching from a fine open area and operating above treeline and powerline heights.

Even a lawfirm with substantial neighbor-vs-neighbor boundary dispute resolution business might pop for such an inexpensive tool where, again given built-in GPS capability, fine evidentiary presentations could be generated of a disputed boundary area, giving a birdseye view with boundary markings superimposed via video software editing. Effective evidentiary presentation being the goal in such an instance.

Such well presented evidence might even serve to keep judges awake during litigation of what are generally unexciting inter-neighbor putzing matches.

(Barna Guzy, are you paying attention?)

_________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Can you imagine the City of Champlin's use for this? Having a few police trap cars, and a number of these things hovering at prime locations - with radar - and you can envision how it would bloster the town aim of having its police force an ever more productive town profit center.

Ask Dennis Berg about all that Champlin stuff. But stand back, the hollering might be hard on your ears.

SHAME ON CHAMPLIN