Ideas (mostly stolen) are the words that greet me when I open my bright green notebook. It’s a small notebook, and the cover is decorated with cacti cartoons — somehow, an appropriate precursor to a book filled with random ideas. I started writing in this notebook when I was interning at a robotics startup. The enticing world of microcontrollers, motors, and sensors was welcoming me with open arms and I was ready to dive in. So, some of the “ideas” in this notebook are ones I came across in hackathons, random online tutorials, or inspired by them. I stopped writing in this notebook a long time ago (now I prefer to Slack DM myself these ideas in screaming capital letters) but every now and then, I find it refreshing to go through it just to see whatever I’m building at the moment, with a new lens. So, here’s some of the ideas in the bright green notebook, word for word.
- Donate your website - an embeddable plugin that allows websites to donate their web traffic to a good cause (I just looked this one up on Product Hunt, and found out that this product is unfortunately no longer available.)
- Headphones that detect when a vehicle is approaching
- Allrecipes’ “dinner spinner” - a tool that lets you spin through a combination of options by ingredients on-hand and how long before the meal is ready
- A sensor that detects the material of clothes/textile using IR absorption spectroscopy (I wrote a bunch of notes next to this one, clearly indicating that I was closer to executing this than the rest - one of the notes reads ‘Found many research papers on this, even found a table containing data about which fabrics absorb which wavelength; Madhu says spectroscopy instruments are expensive but we have access to Sparkfun’s spectroscopy sensor.’)
- Kniterate - It’s a digital knitting machine, like a 3D printer for clothes. It comes with a software where one can design knitwear and it prints it real time!
- An app that can capture photos of clothes you’re planning to throw away and analyse the ways it can be upcycled or repurposed
- Fibrofriend - a machine I’ll make that’s inspired by Dr. Music’s Eletric Pulse Massager, it will primarily be a machine that can soothe fibromyalgia pain using music + electrical pulses. It will also contain a sleep tracker, an anxiety/depression journal, and daily tips from your doctor
- An app to make the search for gifts for friends easier. Just enter their interests and the app finds suitable gifts at affordable prices
- CATRA, developed at MIT, uses a smartphone app and a cheap eyepiece to detect cataract!
- explain-that-political-cartoon - a website that’ll show all trending political cartoons and explains the context. it’ll be a fun way to learn about politics and history
If you’re not inspired enough to yet, here’s me highly recommending making your own bright green ideas notebook.