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Canadian Man Releases Open Source Star Trek Tricorder

Posted by Soulskill on from the very-far-ahead-of-stone-knives-and-bearskins dept.

New submitter upontheturtlesback writes "Another example of Star Trek technology becoming a reality. In light of the recent Tricorder X-Prize announcement, Dr. Peter Jansen has openly released the designs for a series of Science Tricorders that he developed while a graduate student at McMaster University. The Science Tricorders are capable of sensing a variety of atmospheric, electromagnetic, and spatial phenomena. Where the Science Tricorder Mark 1 is a relatively easy-to-build proof of concept, the Science Tricorder Mark 2 runs Linux and resembles a cross between a Nintendo DS and scientific instrument with dual OLED touch displays. An exciting video shows them in action, and describes the project goal of creating general scientific tools for learning about and visualizing the world, as well as their importance for science education by helping kids understand abstract concepts like magnetism or polarization visually. The hardware schematics, board layouts, and firmware source are freely available on the Tricorder project website under various open licenses."

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Impressive but some bugs... by Troyusrex · · Score: 5, Funny

    For instance, I couldn't get the neutrino beam working and while scanning for life forms it identified my cat as silicone based! Neat, but needs some work.

    1. Re:Impressive but some bugs... by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Funny

      The neutrino beam is being worked on.

      The issue with the cat being misidentified as being silicone based was not entirely in error. After reviewing the scan and command logs, your command "identify my cat" ran into a limitation of the internal verbal dictionary.

      Basically, as far as we can determine, the tricorder looked up "cat" for synonyms, and determined that "pus" and "pussy" were suitable alternates.

      It then locked onto the silicone vaginal simulator you keep in your closet, and properly identified its molecular composition.

      We have forwarded the bug report to our naturnal language coding team, and hope to have a bugfix soon.

      Thank you for using Tricorder!