News in spoons

This spoon adjusts instantly to cancel out tremors.

9 comments:

E Hines` said...

A software techie overengineering the thing?

Another way to stabilize any eating utensil would be with gyroscopes. Which is how a lot of other things do get stabilized.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

Would that be fast enough to compensate for a tremor? This may seem excessive, but if you know people with Parkinson's, it really would be nice for them. It's a rotten thing to have to struggle with the basics of eating.

E Hines said...

They're fast enough to stabilize cameras and aircraft INS systems.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

Interesting. My husband was just asking about a camera with a zoom and a stabilizer. They use gyroscopes in those little bitty digital cameras?

Texan99 said...

And why don't they put them in handguns and rifles?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Most people use weighted utensils to reduce tremor. I suppose that might not be enough in some cases...?

E Hines said...

You can get some really dinky gyroscopes, and high speed spinning. For the cameras, they're often not that small and are in separate tripod-type holders, but, yes, they can be put inside the cameras, too.

As to gyro-stabilizing small arms, there are engineering prototypes for some rifles in the military. For pistols, at useful ranges, accuracy would benefit more from actual training in how to shoot.

Mass can be used to dampen vibration--or tremor--but tremors might also benefit from resistance to the motion, which gyroscopes in three planes would provide.

Eric Hines

David Foster said...

Looked it up: the spoon uses accelerometers to detect the motion and then compensates for it using actuators to create an opposing motion.

Small accelerometers have gotten pretty cheap, and I believe they're also used in self-stabilizing cameras.

Texan99 said...

I did some reading last night on a Canon site, with a few helpful diagrams about their stabilizers. It looks like they use little ceramic balls in channels, somewhat like our inner ears. They like ceramic because it's dimensionally stable in changing heat conditions and won't be affected by electromagnetic fields. But that's just the part that detects the motion, not the part that compensates for it, which I assume must be some kind of electronic brain, just like the spoon uses.

Very clever, these tiny electronic devices these days.

I shot last weekend with a friend's rifle that had a nifty smooth-trigger job. It was amazing what a difference it made in accuracy, not to have me jerking the gun so much when I pulled the trigger.