A person named Kris suggested this (on July 7, 2008):

A physically-challened husband needs a call button attached to a vibrating pad in the next room. His wife is on sedative prescriptions and can't hear him call her at night.

The charger to his electric wheel chair and his scooter are not working.

UAV Antenna Tracker

At the Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) we have a UAV project where we use UAVs for remote sensing (more info). To be able to travel long distances from the ground station, we need to use directional antennas to transmit the video and the data from the UAV. The problem with using directional antennas is that we have to always have them pointed at the UAV. Right now, we do this using an antenna rotator from radio shack. By using the antenna rotator, the user can control the orientation of the antenna by a control box which can be placed by the ground station computer. It would save a lot of time and improve our image quality, if this could be done automatically.

This could be done by writing a program on the GCS (ground control station) computer which takes the position of the UAV relative to the ground station, computes the heading of the UAV relative to the ground station and outputs that via USB. This message is transmitted to a piece of hardware which is interfaced to the antenna rotator and tells the antenna rotator where to point.

Difficulty: Medium
Commercial Potential: Low

UAV Antenna tracker

We have a UAV project here at USU where we fly flying wing aircraft with cameras on them for aerial imaging. To allow the UAV to travel a long distance away from the base station, we have a couple directional antennas