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FEEDBACK continued from page 11
Very sorry to hear about your Mother. Having to deal with
sick family members is no picnic.
This also sounds like an interesting and challenging
experimental project! Discriminating between sound that
indicates a problem and sounds that are environmental,
deriving the problem sound's point of origin, moving from the
current location to target location, navigating around obstacles
between current location and target location — that's a lot of
puzzles for an experimental project!
HOWEVER, the key word here is *experimental.* This is
just my opinion, but I don't know that I would want to bet
someone’s life on my ability to program!
If I were going to do a project such as you suggest above,
I would do it as a supplement to an existing monitoring
solution. I can't imagine how I would feel if some harm came
to someone because there was a syntax error in my code that
prevented my bot from performing a life saving action!
Some ideas to consider: Firefighters use a motion sensor
on the body of the firefighter. If they fail to move (become
motionless) for more than a set length of time, an alarm goes
off. Details can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/PASS_device.
You might be able to make something similar with
an accelerometer and a wireless system like a
ZigBee unit. The idea would be to make a
pendant, belt buckle, or other "wearable" device
that is "reset" every time motion is sensed. If no
motion is sensed after a preset period of time,
an alert could be sent to you to go check to
make sure your Mother is okay. The alert could
be SMS to your phone for example.
I'm happy to hear the HVAC idea was
interesting and I would be very interested to
know what you think of the book.
Vern Graner
high-end audio magazines can be a scream. Wonder if the
pre-broken-in cables are "oxygen free" or is that last year's
scam? My personal favorite is still the $300 CD demagnetizer
that restores the high notes you've been missing from your
CDs. CDs, of course, are made of plastic and aluminum —
neither of which can be magnetized (as if that made any
difference to a digital data file anyway.
Tom Wyckoff
You're right on. I wanted to be much more aggressive in
the editorial, but didn't want manufacturers taking out
contracts on me. Yes, they're a scream. I'm almost embarrassed
to buy a Monster cable of any sort — when I do, it's because of
the overall quality, not the vacuum sealed copper conductor
or whatever.
I just finished a book with McGraw-Hill on teardowns. You
wouldn't believe what's inside of those $200 power
conditioners. Anyway, thanks for the note.
Bryan Bergeron
I ♥ NUTS
Being a long time subscriber, your magazine is great with
useful information every month.
Keep up the good work.
John
BROKEN-IN CABLES ... NOT!
Regarding your recent editorial ... those
April 2010 77