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A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

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Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#21

Post by zacharycohn »

jffry wrote: post #5

What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year... Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

They didn't define "hard fall." It's possible it's fine for throwing about right now, but it wouldn't survive being dropped from a second story window.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#22

Post by kabdib »

bcoates wrote: post #9
jffry wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building it with mil-spec parts can legitimately raise the cost. Generally, components have a higher failure rate early in their life, then that failure rate goes down, and eventually goes back up. Mil-spec components are the ones which survive the early failure rate curve, so you're paying for that component, plus the others which didn't survive, plus the initial wear-in process itself. Now, the $1000 price point on…

For custom hardware with a substantial fraction of the feature-set of a modern smartphone, plus way more sensors, $1000 seems ambitiously cheap. They aren't going to sell a billion of them, R&D and tooling costs are going to push the price up a lot.

Cameras are crazy cheap, less than a buck. Lenses may be expensive to design, but you might find something off the shelf to do what you need.

The expensive pieces probably go, in rough order: Case and mounting hardware, radio, reasonable quality sensors, embedded processor and support chips, power supply. Don't know where the cameras fit into that, since you want a bunch of them.

If you can't get a COGS under $200 you don't deserve to be in business.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#23

Post by njharman »

happyFunBall wrote: post #18

"To Make Danger Zones Safer" Dangerous for who? Safer from what or whom? This "safety ball" is there to help one group of people shoot at another group of people, and it's wrong to implicitly state that one group is good and the other evil, simply by virtue that one has this Happy Fun Ball, and the other does not. What if both teams have one? Whose safer now? I bet this would be just as useful in a home invasion, or…

> Dangerous for who? Safer from what or whom?

Firefighters. Collapsing roofs. One example of hundreds.

Things aren't moral. Everything can be used for good or evil. Things aren't something you should rail against. Humans are the problem.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#24

Post by andrewflnr »

happyFunBall wrote: post #18

"To Make Danger Zones Safer" Dangerous for who? Safer from what or whom? This "safety ball" is there to help one group of people shoot at another group of people, and it's wrong to implicitly state that one group is good and the other evil, simply by virtue that one has this Happy Fun Ball, and the other does not. What if both teams have one? Whose safer now? I bet this would be just as useful in a home invasion, or…

It makes it safer for the one throwing the ball. Apparently you missed or are ignoring that those people are just as likely to be disaster responders.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#25

Post by michaelt »

jffry wrote: post #15
michaelt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the aim is to gather a panoramic image while in the air, I would have thought priority #1 would be getting a compact sensor that didn't suffer motion blur when flying and spinning at the same time, in low light conditions, with battery power, low weight and a tiny lens. I mean, my phone camera produces poor images when I'm trying to hold it still, whereas a thrown ball can fly at 80mph or spin at 20-30 revolutions…

At SIGGRAPH 2010, Microsoft Research showed off a technique [1] where they attached an IMU (measures acceleration/rotation) to a DSLR. They recorded motion and used it to deblur the image. A ball flying and spinning through the air should have a fairly simple blur, though of a potentially much higher magnitude. I'm not familiar enough with the state-of-the-art, but my gut tells me that post-facto image processing cou…

I'm not saying it's impossible or anything. If they wanted to they could just put a bright flash on, or wait for the camera to roll to a stop, or buy a crazy high performance sensor.

I'm just saying, if I was running the company, that's the problem I'd be most worried about getting right.

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