I'm Scott.
I'm Russell.
I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, where three eccentric electricians and a guest empty our heads of
startup and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in there so you can all have them
for free.
Anything that we say is yours to keep.
This week, I believe Scott, you brought our guest.
Is that right?
I did.
I am very excited to introduce Richard, who I work with the same engineering company.
Richard's a product development engineer, IT professional, and team lead there.
He's probably brought more products and projects to market than all of us combined.
Mechanical engineer, laser enthusiast, 3D printing master, and a pilot, honestly.
Oh, sweet.
Yeah.
Welcome, Richard.
Welcome.
Thank you.
I'm so excited to have you.
Fellow IT man.
We've got to represent.
That's right.
It's good to have more diverse representation on this show.
Okay.
This week, to get us warmed up, I want to throw a little game around here that I'm going to
call this time.
But can it run Doom?
Literally?
I'm just going to go down the line here and throw things out there, and you need to tell
me if it's something that I made up or if someone has actually gotten Doom running on this hardware.
Are you ready?
And we do, as always, we've got to start with our guest, Richard.
I'm going to start off here with the Honeywell Prestige Thermostat, a small color LCD thermostat.
Did someone, yes or no, get it running Doom?
I would say yes.
Absolutely.
In 2017, a developer named CZ7ASM got a whole hacked thermostat thing going.
It's the best.
Love nerds.
Wow.
Scott, a Walmart self-checkout kiosk.
I hope to God, yes.
Please say yes.
I made that one up.
No!
Man!
Not yet.
Although it's probably just like a full Windows PC in there, right?
Or some Linux-based thing.
You probably could get it pretty easily.
Nothing yet, but look out at DEF CON 2025.
Russell, a pregnancy test.
What?
There's no way.
How could it run it?
There's no way.
No.
That's what inspired this game.
There's a guy, a programmer who was on Twitter named, he calls himself Foon Turing in 2020.
There was this little tiny monochrome LCD display that would say pregnant or not.
And he put some buttons on it and a different CPU and he got it running due.
Oh my God.
What kind of processor does a pregnancy test have?
That's what I'm wondering.
A little arm cortex thing to make the screen work and boom, you're off to the races.
Richard, the AirTag smart Bluetooth device tracker.
I'm going to say no.
Yeah, no, I made that one up.
I'm like, does he need a screen for that one?
It's running dune.
Trust me.
If someone gets a pregnancy test working though, right?
I'll just throw you for a look.
Scott, a John Deere tractor.
I'm going to go back to the no screen on this one and say no.
Someone got the whole instrument cluster and everything running doom.
No way.
Yeah, 100%.
And you could even use the sticks and stuff to input.
It's hilarious.
Yeah, in 2022, it was at DEF CON actually, a group that called themselves Sick Codes.
They were highlighting all the security vulnerabilities in agriculture equipment and how smart all these tractors have gotten and stuff.
But yep, it runs doom.
That's a good demo.
I respect that.
Right.
Exactly.
Russell, the Samsung smart fridge.
Oh, 1,000%.
Yeah, absolutely.
That one had to.
Yeah, yeah.
In 2020, there was a developer posted a video of him running doom on his fridge.
It's the best.
One more time through.
Richard, the MacBook Pro touch bar.
Just the touch bar.
I'm going to say yes.
Yeah.
Someone put the whole UI on the little tiny long monochrome screen.
OLED screen.
Wow.
Scott, a Coinstar machine.
I mean, if you can do it on a pregnancy test, I'm going to say yes to a Coinstar.
I made that one up.
I'm sorry.
No.
New life goal now.
Yeah.
And lastly, Russell, last one of the night.
The IKEA Treadfury light bulb.
What?
A smart bulb.
No.
There's no way.
It's a light bulb.
Yeah.
Someone added a screen and a button to it and got it.
We're in doom.
It's hilarious.
Yeah.
So apparently a lot of them have ESP32s or other ARM chips in them to receive the Wi-Fi
radio waves and change the light bulb.
So someone put a screen on it and boom, you're good.
Hilarious.
If only we used that human potential for something good.
You know, something productive.
Now run doom on it.
Let's run doom on stuff.
Famous 1990 something, 1993 game.
It's been more platforms than anywhere else.
I learned also in the research for this that there's three separate projects for getting
doom running on the TI-83 calculator.
I was good.
I swear you were going to say that one for tonight.
Yeah.
It was a little too obvious.
I thought.
All right.
Who's up first this week?
I think you are, Leo.
Me?
Yeah, I can go first.
Sure.
So I actually pitched Scott in person on this idea a little while ago.
I was pretty hyped up about it.
And then he told me, oh, I think Disher had a project that was kind of like what you're
describing.
So it's perfect that you're here tonight, Richard.
I love the summertime activity of drawing roads and parking lots and stop signs and stuff
with chalk in your driveway or in a parking lot somewhere and having your kid drive around
on a bike, right?
And I think it would be so fun to amp up.
I know if I were a kid, I would feel pretty hyped if there was a working traffic light
in that.
So I want to build and productize a little toy traffic light that the parent can have a
remote for and it can go into a timer mode.
You can set up a couple of them along the route, maybe even like, I don't know, blinking
yields and blinking arrows and stuff too, where like you've got the remote where you can say,
yes, put it into regular 10 second timer mode or kids running at it right now.
I'm going to hit yellow on my little remote and turn red.
And then, oh, the kids, oh, we're having so much fun.
I think it'd be such a fun toy to have a little smart traffic light.
You could 3D print it.
You just need a ring of LEDs and a little like Arduino ESP3.
It'd be pretty easy to get something like that up and running.
I would buy one.
That's the whole pitch.
Traffic light toy.
I have so much respect for little kids and lights now with my brother.
My brother's kids, they have one of those like LED things outside of the bedroom where it's
like you can't come out until the light is green and they just follow it.
I don't know what age that goes away, but it's very powerful right now.
When I'm driving around town, my toddler in the backseat's always like, why are we stopped?
It's green now.
Or whatever.
It's like, no, it's not green yet, honey.
Or, you know, what color is that one up there?
Oh, yeah.
This sounds crazy, but like you could use this for like driving schools or like, you know,
when you're 50, just like trying to get a bunch of kids to pay attention.
Like, yep, this is just the rules of the road.
Like, yeah, bumper cars, right?
You could do, replace the Sims with actual like, all right, you're in a go-kart.
You're going to go around this lot and your test is you driving around a go-kart.
Because those are pretty cheap now, too.
They're like 500 bucks for a Segway.
You know, for one of those Segway ones.
Get a bunch of kids on them and let them roose.
Hey, I mean, it's safer than, and probably cheaper than those.
I don't know if you guys had like those old simulators in high school or like if you did
the driving school.
No.
Like the boxes, like literally wheels, and they would track your score.
I don't know.
They seemed really expensive back in, I don't know.
This, my high school had like a 30, like these old ones.
But anyways, like you can use that to test kids, like, and just get them through training,
just more hours in the road and paying attention.
Let's get them driving even earlier.
I love this.
Hey, that's what, yeah.
The McElroys, my brother, my brother and me did a TV show of six episodes that's really
delightful.
But in that, they described kind of what you're talking about, where they had a thing
in their small West Virginia town called Safety Town.
And it was a bunch of little like electric bumper car type things in a small scaled miniature
like course.
And it was like a little town.
And they'd tear the kids loose on it and say, you know, learn how to obey traffic flow and
all that.
Yeah.
It'd be great for something like that.
I think in the Holland area, we have a group called Velo Kids, where they teach, you know,
lower L kids how to ride bikes.
And they got a bunch of those balance bikes, the scoot bikes.
I'm not sure of the brand name, but they totally would have a heyday with those streetlights
on a course in a parking lot and teach the kids not only how to balance and how to ride,
but what to do at a corner at a stop sign or a stoplight or whatever, you know, stop, look
for traffic.
And of course, you're going to have to make bike traffic go both, you know, four way stop
or a two way stop or whatever, just to make, you know, potential crash opportunities.
Of course.
God, I got to learn early.
It's amazing.
The balance bike to riding a full bike pipeline is so much better than the training wheels
that we have.
For sure.
Like my four year old thrives on his pedal bike now, and there was so little adjustment.
It's really, really cool.
And I know my two kids would love this.
I love the simplicity of the traffic light is so good, Leo.
Like an MVP is exactly what you said.
ESP32, 3D print to housing, start selling it on Etsy or something.
Yeah, exactly.
Kids toys, like smart, smart, quote unquote, even with a dumb little remote and no Wi-Fi,
like so expensive.
Some of these things, like what you were talking about, the LED light for when you wake up in
the morning, my kids have, I think it's Hatch and it's like 150 bucks for a little speaker
and a charging circuit and a battery and a LED light.
And it has, you know, an app, so they have to maintain some kind of server infrastructure,
but it is like $4 worth of parts and it kills me every time, right?
There's five pre-recorded tracks on there for different white noise and that's all you get.
Nope.
Not a smart speaker.
Definitely not a smart speaker, right?
So they don't want it to become that.
So yeah.
Sounds like it needs to play Doom.
That's for sure.
Totally could, probably.
Totally could.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think there's a lot of like outside of the toy aspect.
Like imagine when a, you know, when the street light goes down, you have a bunch of cops or
whatever, like traffic people drive around with like four of these little ones in the, in the
back of their car.
It's definitely safer than being in the road.
They hold it.
They stand in the middle of the street and just hold it.
You throw up like a, you attach like a tripod, a quick little retractable tripod.
You throw it on the road and now instant traffic control, safer than having a cop in the middle
of the road.
They can manually, let's say use the exact same timing that came in the original street light.
But now when it goes down, you could have like a cop just, or whatever, a service officer,
just go around and drop a bunch of those for like three or four street lights back to normal.
That's a cool idea.
Yeah.
They're in a power outage.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
Especially, yeah, like when there's a disaster, like you got a ton of people probably trying
to get around.
You need something like that and you don't want more accidents and boom, easy.
Keep those.
And those, those could probably sell.
That's where you sell it for like $8,000 a package or something, you know?
Sure.
That's the economies of scale.
I mean, they're disposable at that point.
Yeah, for sure.
One time use.
Seal in the battery.
Take that mother earth.
Not returnable.
It's capitalism.
That's great.
Oh, you got to have one of those, those pull tabs, you know, like when you get the toy,
you got to pull the little thin plastic thing out.
So the battery.
Yeah.
Part of the reason I'm thinking about this as a product is because I bought a full size traffic
light recently.
like a standard, like auction was on the street one.
Oh, cool.
Today I put it up on our wall.
It's up.
I ripped out all the incandescent stuff.
Yeah.
I told Scott about this.
I ripped out all the incandescent relays and stuff and just put in three rings of 12 LEDs
in there and an ESP32.
And when our server status dashboard is green, it's green.
And when it's got, you know, partial downtime or maintenance, it's yellow.
And if there's a major outage, it's red and it blinks and stuff.
It's really, really, really easy to get this kind of thing up and running.
Right.
Nice.
It seems like I'm doing this work and it's like, man, I could just like not buy a decommissioned
light from Facebook marketplace, but instead, you know, put it in a little 3D printed housing
and my kids would love this too, you know?
Was it, did you make the whole like electronic remote control thing or I guess you did?
It's not remote controlled now.
It's just going to the internet and pulling every 30 seconds.
Like what's the current server status?
Okay.
It's wall art for our office, you know?
It's not a toy.
Lug that around on your back.
They're made of plastic now.
It wasn't that heavy after I took out the metal mounting brackets and stuff.
It's pretty lit.
Oh, I always forget how big they are.
Yeah.
It's like four or five feet tall.
Yeah.
That's just another example of one of those pitches where it's just something that I want
personally in my life.
I think almost all your pitches are and I respect that.
Gotta have passion for it.
Well, that's a, that's a good transition to me.
This is one that I want and absolutely don't need.
And probably would make the world worse, honestly.
Oh, I want this.
Okay.
All right.
I had a, two things happen to me recently that made me think this.
One, I watched Spinal Tap.
If you haven't seen that fake documentary in a while.
And two, my sister-in-law always does her one second videos.
Have you ever seen that app where you take like a one second clip every day throughout the
year and puts it together and it just kind of shows you what you did throughout the year.
They're great.
Yeah.
I'm going to put a dollar in the AI swear jar and say, I want an AI driven service that
would automatically create a documentary of my life about me.
And it was just using a combination of my entire digital footprints, my, all my Google photos,
videos, social media posts.
Hell, I didn't get it.
Probably not email, but like voice notes or texts and just make all the highlights, birthdays,
vacations, major milestones with a narrator.
We'll have Morgan Freeman in the back, just describing what Scott is doing and going about
in his life.
That is what I want.
You can send that to your family as a Christmas card.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's like Spotify wrapped or whatever, but whatever customized time period you want, maybe
the last 10 years of my life or maybe the, I mean, there aren't many companies that are
positioned super well to do this except for Google and maybe Facebook if you're a big Facebook
person.
But I feel like you could with chat GPT five now and just all the image and video recognition
now you could, you know, it's not out yet, but what they're talking about with, uh, you
could have a pretty good narration and probably weirdly accurate to the ones that happened in
your life.
Hallucinates a little bit.
It's like, remember when you got that divorce?
You're like, Oh, I don't, I don't remember that.
Thanks.
Gemini.
Generate the video in between.
If it's missing something ever.
Right.
Here's a render of Scott going to the opera.
That's fun.
I feel like we are, uh, predisposed as salt of the earth.
Midwesterners here to like be humble about ourselves and meek and mild and all that.
But I would totally watch a video of my own life.
I'm vain enough to like enjoy that.
Yeah.
I feel like we're humans.
Most people are.
That's why social media took off.
We want to see ourselves like online.
Why do you think it'd be the world would be worse with this?
Cause I'm giving an AI direct access to all these more things that I'm already probably
shouldn't in the first place.
Yeah.
Remember when the test results came back?
Oh yeah.
Thanks.
Narrator.
Crazy heavier targeted ads.
Oh no.
Why'd my insurance go up this year?
Gave my health records to check GPT.
I think that's, I think I watched all the time.
Like these videos that I get on like Apple photos that is like, remember this trip, right?
Yeah.
Three months or like a year and a half ago.
And you're like, whoa, I do now.
Right.
It's just like, it's an awesome experience to like relive something really quickly.
Right.
And so like, even in a short, I want a two hour feature film, but, but right.
I think that's like, why not at the end of the year, celebrate the year, right?
You know?
And Google photos did that, but it's still only just the year.
If you could take every one of those that's been generated or whatever, and try to find
through lines and plots.
And oh yeah.
Every time you wore that shirt, you were doing these things or that time that you were with
this person once a year for five years in a row, it was this thing that you do or, you
know, trying to like draw patterns and stuff.
That's what AI is best at.
Right.
Dude.
It'd be so weird to like see my wife's two year documentary or like my kids two year documentary.
Just like, yeah.
Whoa.
There's so much that you're living outside of what I know, especially when you're like really
close with them.
Right.
So it's like, that would be, that would be nuts to watch somebody else's too.
That's how you find out about the affair.
Boy, the Pablo's always hanging around.
Look at all those photos you have.
Yeah.
It's just a friend.
She always wears this when she's.
Or doesn't wear this.
Yeah, right.
All right, Russell, what do you got this week?
Yes.
So, all right, this week.
Okay.
I was thinking about, so I work in a, the stormwater industry.
Right.
And so one of the things that comes up a lot is people, whenever it rains, people like have
a problem with like puddles or ponding or issues on the road.
And my tech experience, there's this site called Down Detector.
That's like self-reported.
Like, oh, is this website down?
And literally your first Google search always brings you to Down Detector or something.
And it's literally just a website with people self-reporting that it's down.
And it's sometimes actually more often than not more reliable than the actual site that
is down.
Because.
The status dashboard.
Yeah.
There's probably some bureaucracy.
They're like, oh, do we want to release this information that we're down for 10 seconds?
And then sure enough, like an hour later, we are experiencing some downtime.
Right.
But like Down Detector told me an hour and a half before, like, okay, it's down.
I can tell everybody on Slack, like, stop bugging me.
I know Gmail's down or whatever.
Right.
So I guess I was thinking you could do this in a bunch of other ways and more thinking like
local community and GPS.
So like when you're seeing flooding or a fire or a streetlight being down or all these other
things, Waze, a cop, you know, like Waze does that really well.
So it's kind of like combining social reporting, but more for like the problem.
Right.
And I think what's really cool about it is that data is so valuable because if you see reports
in a common location all the time, like, you know, even like something like a lot of trash
accumulates here, you report anything.
Right.
So we just encourage any nuisance reporting.
Oh, no.
And it just turns into like, well, we probably should solve a problem here.
And whether that's like a community coming together and being like, wow, there's there is a lot
of bad stuff going on here or we should solve this problem.
Like now it's it's publicly available, self-reported and anybody can maybe solve that problem.
Right.
But simply put, it's report a problem in your community.
Karen.com.
I was, I was having a conversation with one of the guys that I worked with this afternoon
and he said that, and I don't think it works anymore, but in Kent County, they had an app
that you could pin potholes and graffiti.
Really?
graffiti.
Yeah.
And he said he got so many potholes repaired in like short order.
And then just a little while ago, he went to use it again because he moved outside of the
city limits.
Mm-hmm.
And, but he, but he's still in Kent County a lot.
So, but he went to use the app again and it's not working.
Oh, it sounds like there was market validation there, Russell.
Yeah.
So it was pretty interesting, but it's kind of on the same regards as what you're talking
about, Russell.
Yeah.
Potholes, graffiti.
That's a great one.
Like that's just stuff I want.
Somebody should take care of.
I'm not going to, that's as far as I want to go.
I just want to report it and move on.
Right.
It's step one.
You're right.
It seems like your customer would not be just the public.
I mean, it could be, I guess, direct to consumer, but your customer could be a partnership with
the local, you know, municipalities and utilities and stuff.
Right.
You go to them and say, Hey, deploy this, advertise it, whatever in your town.
We'll facilitate it.
We'll keep it running.
Heck, maybe you even like show ads to the users and you make it free for the, you know, municipalities
to have or cheap or something.
And then, or you get double income, I guess.
I don't know.
Oh yeah.
But then yeah, like you facilitate the talk so that there's crowdsourcing and they don't
have to figure out how to make an app.
It's weird.
Cause like if your goal is to drive traffic to your app or website, like reporting stuff
is honestly a great way to do that.
People, uh, sorry, but complaining about something like this is bad.
I want this fixed.
I want to tell people that'd be great for ads and revenue.
Yeah.
And I think local governments hate receiving those reports.
Like the front desk lady doesn't know where to direct it to.
Yeah.
There's a pothole.
Okay.
Uh, who do I send it to?
Especially if it's like an empty text box and you're getting all the like, I hated that
my neighbor left their lawn chair out front or there's all the like cruft.
If you can somehow whittle this down to predefined categories like ways does or somehow have the
like the flow.
And then everyone who picks other just gets thrown away or something.
I don't know.
You keep it hosted.
Just one website.
It'll automatically put you in the, it has your location on there.
And so it'll put you in the right district.
I really liked this idea.
Russell, you could gamify it like ways did and have like the leaderboard.
Wow.
This guy's a graffiti champ.
He unlocked the graffiti award, you know?
And then you could even like report when it got solved.
Right.
And give a bunch of kudos to all those people that reported it, you know?
That's a great one.
Yeah.
If you get the municipality in there, like marking them as done, then they're giving out like
free city bucks or whatever.
Yeah.
Not just notoriety.
I want to be top dog in my reporting.
City points.
Yeah.
That's what makes it so simple to sell this.
Cause like you, you're selling it to the municipality for them to market it, but it's not costing
them anything outside of just promoting it themselves.
Everyone wins here.
I think it'd be fun too, just to see everybody complaining about certain things.
It's kind of like next door, but geolocation.
Yes.
And it's all, you know, recorded forever on here.
They could literally use that as their filing system for complaints.
Yeah.
Any local government.
Gotta figure out the bullying aspect.
Yeah.
I was just going to say, there's like a whole gossip scene around our local Facebook groups
that center around our town where it's like.
That's true.
The meta narrative of, oh, can you believe this happened over there again?
Kind of stuff.
You have to somehow skirt that.
And I think the predefined categories is one way to do that.
The McDonald's on 32nd is on fire again.
That's his own category.
See you next week.
Well, you know what?
Maybe we do the Waze thing where they, is there a cop still here or is there a fire still
here and just have, you know, a little bit of a rotation?
Is that McDonald's still burning down, by the way?
I just thought I'd ask.
No big deal.
No hurry.
But just curious.
Is the library burning to the ground?
Is it still on fire?
Right?
It would be kind of fun to troll it.
You know, there's been a nuclear incident downtown or something.
Yeah.
You know, that makes me think there's probably, the reporting might be different.
It might be more, like, sustained, right?
Because you have your, like, reports of, there's a big cop showdown or whatever.
Lots of sirens at Centennial Park, right?
I see that all the time in, like, Holland Informed or whatever, or whatever, right?
So, it's just none of that.
Maybe it is maybe more stuff that's permanent.
That's probably reaching out.
Yeah.
Otto gets filtered into that miscellaneous category over there.
Yeah.
The idea of trolling you by dropping a pin on your house every day that says it's just
full of shit.
There is poop all over this yard again every day.
Massive hoarding.
Junkyard.
Every time you open this app, it's going to be like, is there still poop in your yard?
You're like, no, stop saying there is.
Yeah.
The trolling would be real.
It would.
We'd have to ban people.
We'd have to have a moderation system.
Oh, man.
I would wear a ban from this app as a badge of honor.
Your city bucks.
You're not going to get your city bucks now, Leo.
Ah, dang it.
Yeah.
There's an element of like, report a liar is what I'll put on there.
Publicly.
Yeah.
You need a way to like publicly flog and shame these people.
Right.
How do you make trolling not fun on this thing like this?
Yeah.
Hmm.
My neighbor would used to, I think it was Holland Informed, he would troll them.
Whenever it rains super hard, the drains on our street just don't work and it would always
flood.
It would flood every time.
And he would just get his kayak out with his kids and they'd kayak up and down 17th Street.
Oh, awesome.
And then he would post pictures on Holland Informed to be like, can someone fix this?
So.
Nice.
He's, he was just ahead at the time.
And long after they fixed it, he's still posting those photos from four years prior.
He saved them.
I thought we fixed that.
100%.
Scott, were you sledding and tubing behind a car?
Was that you guys in college?
That was me.
Oh, that was not me.
Yeah.
Open the tailgate and go down on a snow day down the road with a sled.
Yep.
And then the cops pulled us over.
How'd you explain that one?
Well, it was funny because he, I was like sitting in the sled and he pulled up right behind me
and then walked past me.
Cut her loose, cut her loose.
To the car driver.
And you're like, I wonder if he was going to talk to me like a pat, you know, because I'm
like driving the sled, you know?
It was awesome.
What did he do?
Did you get a ticket?
I think they told us to stop and then that was it.
That makes sense.
It was awesome though.
That's so funny.
Highly recommend if you, but.
You should ask, can we hook onto the back of your car and do it with the lights and sirens?
We need a police escort.
Stab.
That's like the kind of thing you'd take a picture of and say, won't someone plow these
streets?
Jesus.
And put it in your app.
That's true.
There's a person.
There's a person who made an anonymous Facebook page where they spray painted penises over
potholes all over their city in the UK.
Oh yeah.
And he named himself Wanksy.
Oh wow.
And this person did that on purpose so that the municipality would have to go and fix it
and clean it up.
And while they were there, they'd fix the pothole.
I love that.
So funny.
I've seen the Domino's ones before.
The Domino's just fixes them and puts their logo on top of it.
Whoa.
On public road.
Fixed by Domino's.
You're welcome.
Oh geez.
Big corporations.
Yeah.
I hate that.
All right, Richard, what do you have for us this week?
Well, I do have a product idea that I'm working on and hopefully Scott's going to help me with
it so I can talk about that one at least first.
Let's do it.
I've been helping Velo kids here in the Holland area and they're a non-profit and their goal
is to really get kids on bikes.
And as a non-profit, you really want to be able to communicate to your donors and the community
on what kind of a difference you're making.
And right now, the only metric that they're able to really report is how many kids they
got on bikes.
But I thought it would be really cool if we were to be able to create a device to install
on a bike that we could track how many miles and potentially even give parent an access to
an app and actually show them the trail that they rode and how fast they went.
And a lot of these are camps and stuff.
So during the camp, on week one, they're probably getting off the couch.
They're going to run onto a bike and they're going to struggle to complete the course.
But by the end of the six-week camp, they're probably rocking it out.
And just to be able to show the parents the difference that this program made, this may
have been the very first time that they ever even rode a bike.
Or they might be super competitive and going after it hard.
But the metrics still speak pretty loudly for the individual and for the parents, but more
importantly for the program and the donors.
You know, like last year, they literally tripled the amount of kids that they got on bikes.
You know, and they're hoping to grow and expand even more this year into the Grand Haven area.
And to be able to have some tangible metrics to show like, hey, we not only had 3,000 kids on bikes,
but we rode, you know, how many thousands of miles with these kids.
Totally.
Like that would be pretty cool.
And my thought would be like, especially for the first time riders, like this device could even have a camera.
You know, I think of a product that Scott had made a while back, you know, that actually captured the moment.
And Russell.
You know, like how cool would it be to capture the kids very first time for actually, you know, riding a bike and be able to, you know, Scott, you could have that as your, your, your highlight video.
You know, that it sends it back to you like, hey, you know, so-and-so your kid, you know, rode their bike for the very first time.
And oh, by the way, here's the video of it.
That's great.
It's all existing components.
I was just going to say all of this is been demonetized before.
A hundred percent.
GPS, camera.
Even bike computers is a category of thing, but I don't think there's distributed bike computers where a fleet is reporting back to like a central tracking thing.
Yeah.
Like the admin is keeping track of all that stuff.
I had this exact same problem that you're describing, but with pedometers.
Someone came to me at Hope College and said, we want to measure across all these different employees in our dining area, how many steps they all take to see if we can make some of their like trips across the kitchen more efficient.
Some of these employees walk 8,000 steps a day and some walk 20,000 steps.
That's because they're the baker that has to go over to the mixing station, then all the way across to the oven.
And we want to know where we should put the oven.
Right.
And I found one company that targets K-12 schools that is like the, everyone gets a pedometer.
And then when they're done at the end of gym class, they snap their pedometers in and it just like collects all the information on the computer.
Oh, yeah.
You kind of, you want that, right?
Where you've got like all these bikes with the clipped on computers.
And then at the very end, you get back your mileage and your bike number 12 went on this way and here's their map.
And yeah, you don't have to like worry about making accounts for all these different trackers and getting the data somehow.
Dude, that'd be so cool.
I love that, Leo.
And for you, Richard, because like that solves all the battery charging issues.
Because you're constantly going back, you're just cycling those guys.
The data gets downloaded.
We don't need wireless anymore.
I did kind of like the idea of a giant mesh network of a bunch of six-year-olds on bikes and Bluetooth going around.
But this is, I really like that, Leo.
Even during the event, you could have like the leaderboard of who's in like what place and, you know, oh, wow, so-and-so's gone and they're in number one or whatever, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, this is just the Lime scooter technology minus the scooter, right?
You take all the, I'm sure that those micro SIMs and all that stuff, you just get a little box.
You stick it exactly as Leo said, like boom, throw it on every bike.
That technology is out there.
It's super cheap.
It's just probably a small subscription if you want to use SIM.
If you don't, it probably is just like GPS or something.
You can just create a different set of options.
Awesome.
Local Wi-Fi network or something.
Sure.
Zigbee.
Yeah.
Just a massive Wi-Fi network over everything.
Leo, what you're saying though, like this is like a niche case for that.
But if you had truly had a device that snaps in, like you said, and had an accelerometer and GPS and all those fun things, there's probably a million applications for that.
Totally.
And any factory.
Factory.
Yeah.
Any kind of manufacturing on there.
It's like a supercharged AirTag.
Smart AirTag.
With like network, you know, taking the AirTag to the next level, right?
Yeah.
And they're already pedaling to make power.
You've got to make it so that it's hooked up to the wheel so that there's a little magnet that's like slowly generating an electric current to keep it charged.
Sure.
Just shake it, you know?
Or a little wind turbine on the front that's spinning.
A little beanie.
I can't get over the amount of applications that could have this if you had a closed system where, hey, I know all these tags are going to be back at the end of X time in my possession where I can charge, download data, and figure out what to do with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Your Pedometer one's a great example.
I mean, this might be good for like, I don't know, playgrounds or like if you have camps, right, with a bunch of kids, you know, you don't want to lose a kid.
Give them ankle tight and bracelets.
You know, just like, like if you, you know, if you have like a camp where you have a thousand campers, like it's kind of like a peace of mind aspect.
Like, oh, we are missing a kid.
Now, just, you know, it'd be nice to know where they are very quickly.
Maybe it's a safety thing for parents, right?
Because like, if you're going to have your kid off walking around in the woods, you know, their middle school, like there's a lot of camp adventures that you kind of want them to go explore, but you don't want them to.
Find a bear.
Well, or just go somewhere they shouldn't or they get lost.
Like, it'd be kind of cool to allow kids to like go on a trail, a set of trails and know that we can find them at the end of the day if they happen to go make a right instead of a left, right?
Tons of adventure, like camps out there would need something like this for sure.
Yeah.
I think of athletic teams too, like track teams or cross country team.
Imagine a real-time dashboard for a coach at a track meet that you could see your athletes and how they're performing.
And if you, you know, from that perspective, if you were able to kind of overlay some of their recent training to see if they're like, you know, if they're going to get one of their personal best or, you know, if they're not having the greatest of a day or whatever.
And then, you know, and if they're running more than one event, like you could, you could really kind of connect with them in between races and say, Hey, like, you know, you're, you're underperforming today or man, you're killing it today.
What are you doing different today that you did, you know, at, you know, training over the past week or two?
That's great.
You know, as far as implementation goes, it's fun to dream up the hardware and how we would assemble from basic components.
But you could probably do this with software only on an Apple Watch type thing where like either they're using their own device and you somehow registered into your session that you are managing or you have your case of 20 Apple Watches that you already have.
And then that has everything you need, right?
Yep, for sure.
True.
You've got GPS accelerometer.
You've got connectivity out.
You've got, you know, you load up the one app that's on there and it's somehow talking back home to home base and reporting out all these stats.
That's incredible.
It's basically like Strava or one of those other run apps, but more flexible to a centralized, like, like I'm in charge of all these different trackers at once.
All you need then is a big charging station for a bunch of them.
That's the only hardware you got to make.
And then AliExpress, a ton of cheap Android based smartwatches that you put your own and only your own app on there and you're done.
And then sell it for $10,000 to Russell's school.
Yeah.
Or camp.
Yeah.
The camp is an interesting thing, too.
Then you just need a box.
You just need a box.
Yeah.
A charger box.
Yeah.
I remember at my hospital or like when my baby was born, they had like a station with 20 iPhones and everybody in this nurse's station uses iPhones to communicate to each other with the Epic app.
Yeah.
I mean, it's crazy.
iPhone.
Yeah.
Why?
Old iPhones.
I don't know.
It's just they're instead of a walkie talkie, they use iPhones.
Right.
And so you just take that similar concept, just dock and dock and run.
Right.
Huh.
I want to do this.
Yeah.
It seems like you could get there with just software, right?
Mm-hmm.
You make your app.
I wonder if that like the scooter technology or like without the scooter, like you just buy those.
I think those are really cheap, actually.
Just like those little devices.
Little like head unit.
Really?
Yes.
Yeah.
Like not the whole scooter, but like the SIM card GPS combo, like that's within the scooter itself.
You just take those few components out.
No kidding.
And stick it.
I think, yeah.
I was looking at this for next door photo, like for my photo company, like for tracking media, our photographers.
But it was, yeah, I don't, you can buy like a network.
Like there's companies out there that are resellers of scooter tech and they sell like the SIM card packages and all that stuff.
And I think there was one that you could bring your own device.
You would buy their, you'd buy their technology that would stick on that scooter.
Sure.
But if it doesn't exist, I mean, that's, I mean, just take the three components and throw it in a, you know, a box.
You're not as constrained.
If you decide to go with your original idea, Richard, of like something that's clipped onto the bike, then you're not as constrained for battery and weight and size and stuff.
You've got a little bit more room to make something that'll last all day and be a little bit less maintenance than fiddling with, you know, getting watch bands and charging them after a couple hours because they're so small and all that.
The screens too, right?
Like just might add a lot of extra, right?
How smart is the smartest bike computer that you could buy just for yourself?
Remember how they had like little like speedometers that you clip onto there and it'll like, look at the wheel.
Do they have those that track location and stuff now?
Can you play Doom on it?
It'll definitely play Doom, I'm sure.
They're, I mean, they've, they've got some that are crazy powerful.
Some of the Garmin stuff for bikes and crazy expensive too.
But yeah, some of them will not only, you know, have a GPS and track your ride, but they've got like 4k video capability like built into them.
Wow.
Yeah.
Some of them are pretty out of this world.
When you said 4k video for a brief moment, I thought you meant to watch.
I was like, so you can put like Peloton right into a tree.
Right.
Yeah.
No dash cam, but bike.
That's cool.
Dash.
Yeah.
Bike cam.
Yeah.
I still like the smartwatch version of it because there's just so much flexibility there.
You're a little more weight and battery constrained, but then you do get things like heart rate and all that stuff too, which is cool.
Body metrics.
Yeah.
The key component is you're saying like swap them each time you change out, recharge.
That makes it so much easier.
You could do this for like 5k's and marathons and stuff to get a real time map of where all your people are, not just by bib number.
But because some of those, the bibs I think are pretty much all smart nowadays and that's how they'll measure your time.
But if you could also get like minute by minute analytics across the whole thing for an optional additional fee, I bet a lot of runners and stuff would sign up for that too.
Absolutely.
They probably, a lot of them probably have Garmin watches and stuff though.
Somehow being able to take your Garmins and Fitbits and Apple watches of the world and like contribute that data out to a centralized organizer of an event or something seems like the missing piece there.
And a lot of these platforms probably aren't incentivized to give that data away, huh?
Yeah, that could be.
I think of running, you know, girls on the run.
You know, they're getting middle school, is it middle school?
No, it's elementary school girls.
And they have a program through the school and they run together at least one day a week, maybe two days a week.
And then at the end of the program, they all run a 5k.
Oh, cool.
And, you know, they would totally benefit, you know, because a lot of those kids, they're not going to have the smartwatch, you know.
But if the program had some that they could loan out to the different schools, because they don't all do the same 5ks at the same time, right?
So if they had a set of these that they could loan out to, you know, the kids at a particular elementary school and they could, you know, not only use it for training, but then use it to run the race.
And then to be able to share that data with family and the program and administrative officer or whatever, you know, then they could maybe even use that data to help tailor the program a little bit, too.
Yep.
Well, dear listener, if you've chosen to listen to the show instead of Eye of the Tiger while you're running your latest 5k, we're very grateful for your time.
Thanks for listening and hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you so much, Richard, for joining.
This was so fun.
Yeah, you bet.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, yeah.
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