OK, in the spirit of the way this thread is going, and in the hope of getting
anyone's creative juices going, or just amusing ourselves...
Some of these I've suggested here before:
- Text messaging. Replace all of the slate, buddy-attract noisemakers, and
hand signals, with less confusion/misunderstanding. Could be integrated
with AI computers so you could check your buddy's air and other stats.
It could also be integrated with the boat for recall, distress, etc signalling.
But there's no directional info (Where's the boat? Where's the diver?).
All the technology exists in other existing pieces of rec diver gear.
Just integrate it in one package.
- We've seen the HUDs arrive, but really, there's a simpler solution that
would cover 90% of the same utility. Current synthesized text-to-audio
technology is very effective, and could easily be integrated in a dive
computer. Give me a wireless (or wired could work, I suppose) earphone
and let my dive computer tell me about alarms, about every 100/250/whatever
psi change, or every 5 minutes, as I have it configured, about depth, etc.
Or just when I press the backlight button. I think I'd rather have that than
an HUD, actually.
And then leveraging that, speak my buddy's, or the boat's, text messages
to me. And while I'm not an advocate of listening to music while diving,
there's probably a place for it (deco stops, maybe), and if you're already
wearing an earphone...
- Affordable dive lights with both through-the-case inductive recharge and
magnetic reed switches. LED of course. Never ever have a flooded light,
because they are factory sealed, or close to it.
- Ditto for computers - through-the-case inductive recharge. Never open
the case except maybe every five years, acceptable to do at the factory.
And bluetooth for the PC link.
- Regarding Lorenzoid's discussion of Inertial guidance, I gave some thought
to that a year or so ago. It works in principle, using what are called 6-axis
accelerometers (acceleration in three orthoginal coordinates and additionally
three rotational accelerations, one around each axis). This is the underlying
sensor technology for Wii game controllers etc.
It really works; by integrating (in the mathematical sense) the acceleration,
you can get velocity and position/orientation in the six dimensions of interest.
You do get some very interesting problems with a hand-held box such as a diver
would carry, where you have to keep track of how the box is oriented in
order to know how to interpret what each sensed axis means wrt the
real world, but I believe it can be done with a microprocessor you could
reasonably put in such a device.
The fly in the ointment, however, is drift error. All physical sensors have
some tolerances for how accurately they can measure their input and
transform it to something the computer can read. Looking at the accelerometers
commercially available, I calculated that after an hour of measuring acceleration
and integrating twice to calculate position, your positional error would be
on the order of a quarter mile. Not exactly a magic boat finder.
Truly worth the effort for a submarine trying to maintain (or estimate)
position while submerged, but not so much for the Scuba application, IMO.
I thought about a button the user could press that tells the device "I'm stationary"
that would then let it know that current velocity is 0, which would reduce the
drift error, but that's clumsy and hard to explain to the user.
And then there are drift dives, where the boat moves, for which this is
useless anyway
At any rate, I don't want to be a naysayer; get the accelerometer precision
up and this ought to be very doable. Just make sure this is part of your
design process.
