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Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you. That sounds fascinating. Any reading you recommend? A g

Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you. That sounds fascinating. Any reading you recommend? A gadget mounted in your helmet could click softly as your head turns past cardinal points. Great idea, and probably pretty trivial with an arduino. I might try to work something up for my bike helmet.

ncmncm 5y ago
Now that bluetooth is easy to put into a gadget, it would be easier to configure than would have been convenient just a few years back, where you would need USB or buttons or something. It would have a magnetic sensor to sample 3D orientation now and again (maybe per second), an inertial-platform chip for lower-powered moment-to-moment tracking and dead reckoning, and power up a GPS once in a while to get absolute position, correct the compass heading, and rebase the inertial platform. It would have a distinguished click for when you face the next way point, or your campsite. I am partial to the idea of weak electric shocks instead of audio. But that might be a harder sell. People usually talk about shaker motors, but that is a recipe for needing lots of battery. I would rather the whole system weigh less than an AA cell, and run for weeks on a charge or button cell. About the fingernail magnets, I recall stories about people who implanted magnets in their fingertips. It struck me as kind of dumb, vs gluing, although maybe the more nerve endings would make them more sensitive. The description was that near AC motors and transformers they could feel a vibration, and could tell whether metals were ferrous by touch. I expect you could get a sense of how conductive metal is by wiggling the magnet near it.
andai 5y ago
I remember reading a while ago (5-10 years?) about someone implanting a tiny rare magnet in their fingertip. That seems to provide more sensitivity than attaching it to the nails, at the cost of, well, implanting a chunk of metal in your finger. Another interesting story is a fellow (Danish, I believe?) who calls himself a cyborg because he was born (completely?) colorblind but attached an antenna to his head that allows him to hear a tone that changes depending on the color in front of him. At some point he began to hear these color-sounds in his dreams as well.

ncmncm 5y ago

Now that bluetooth is easy to put into a gadget, it would be easier to configure than would have been convenient just a few years back, where you would need USB or buttons or something. It would have a magnetic sensor to sample 3D orientation now and again (maybe per second), an inertial-platform chip for lower-powered moment-to-moment tracking and dead reckoning, and power up a GPS once in a while to get absolute position, correct the compass heading, and rebase the inertial platform. It would have a distinguished click for when you face the next way point, or your campsite. I am partial to the idea of weak electric shocks instead of audio. But that might be a harder sell. People usually talk about shaker motors, but that is a recipe for needing lots of battery. I would rather the whole system weigh less than an AA cell, and run for weeks on a charge or button cell. About the fingernail magnets, I recall stories about people who implanted magnets in their fingertips. It struck me as kind of dumb, vs gluing, although maybe the more nerve endings would make them more sensitive. The description was that near AC motors and transformers they could feel a vibration, and could tell whether metals were ferrous by touch. I expect you could get a sense of how conductive metal is by wiggling the magnet near it.

andai 5y ago

I remember reading a while ago (5-10 years?) about someone implanting a tiny rare magnet in their fingertip. That seems to provide more sensitivity than attaching it to the nails, at the cost of, well, implanting a chunk of metal in your finger. Another interesting story is a fellow (Danish, I believe?) who calls himself a cyborg because he was born (completely?) colorblind but attached an antenna to his head that allows him to hear a tone that changes depending on the color in front of him. At some point he began to hear these color-sounds in his dreams as well.