deranged engineering pt. 1

I'll be routinely posting my plans/thoughts/hopes/dreams for projects here. along with as much info as I can about them.


1st: Monowheel. Powered by a 5hp Briggs and Stratton engine I've found on a broken roto-tiller. To drive the wheel I will use motorcycle chain fixed to the inside of the wheel, driven by a cog mounted on the passenger cradle inside the wheel.


The single wheel will be about 5' in diameter with dual tires made of heavy-gauge rubber tubing (1.25-2" diameter tubing around the outside of the wheel). The wheel itself will be made of 3/16-1/4" wall tubing that's between 1" and 1.5" in diameter. Three hoops of the tubing gusseted together with pieces of 1/8-3/16" steel plate will make up the final construction. Each tire will be cradled between two of the three hoops.


the passenger cradle will ride on the outermost two hoops of the wheel, and will contain the motor, gears, and driver. it will ride on four wheels above the two hoops, and two wheels below it. Steering will be accomplished by leaning the vehicle.


Anything more specific than this can't be worked out until I start construction. If I start construction. There's a certain tool I need for bending the hoops that I need to either build or buy, (neither of which are terribly appetizing thoughts.)


2: Prosthetic hand What would make this one differ from others, is that it would use very thick, steel bones, jointed as closely to the human hand as possible. These bones would be actuated by high tensile strength wires, like a complicated puppet. The wires would be actuated by small motors mounted on the back of the hand. Now, it's obvious that all the joints of the hand can't be done this way, but to move the four main fingers in a clenching motion, I need two sets of wires each. the muscles that spread and contract the fingers sideways need not be as powerful as the clenching motors. This could be achieved with "squiggle motors" (look it up)

The thumb is the most difficult of all. Not so much for complexity, but it needs roughly the strength of the other four fingers, it's also the most used and necessarily the most dexterous of the fingers. It's position doesn't help any either.

more than that, there are more fundamental problems. The first being finding motors of the appropriate size with sufficient torque and rotational speed. If they even exist, I don't know. The second problem being the need for constant electrical power. Now, my thought is to determine exactly how the "electric eel" produces electricity in its body. Using stem cell technology, genetically engineer a biological battery that uses energy from food to produce electricity to run the prosthetic.

Continuing the problem: control. of course research is being done into the field of how the human brain sends and decodes commands to certain muscles, but I would propose a much simpler procedure to decode the commands. Use electrodes to monitor electrical impulses traveling down the arm, and simultaneously, use very accurate motion capture hardware to, as precisely as possible, monitor the exact movements of the hand. Then use the computer, (or just a lot of calculating, or both) to attempt to isolate an exact command that triggers and exact movement. I'd imagine this would be a very tedious process, but if humans nerve impulses are at least similar (it'd be irresponsible to consider them exactly the same) the process would become less and less troublesome as development continues. there is also the human body's ability to adapt to things like this. (as babies, we don't quite know how to control our muscles yet, it's learned over childhood, it's understandable that this same thing would occur to let the brain adapt to the prosthetic)

Those are the two thoughts that are dominating my free time thinking now. I think they're feasible, and as far as I know, they are. Of course I'm no expert, but certainly once I become an expert, I'll be looking back at these ideas and contemplating they're actual feasibility. Perhaps continuing and building them, I don't know, we'll just have to see.