HUD stands for Heads Up Display, and is commonly found in the cockpits of modern airplanes. We want to take this technology and apply it to everyday vehicles. In a car a HUD could save lives. It could post the speed limit of the current area and even outline the proper lane to be in… No more accidental drives down the wrong way of a one way street!  It could also highlight the lane you are in and provide a clear path down a dark and windy road. The HUD could also have radar detection capabilities (where legal) and even outline the police car from a significant distance away.

New Firefighting Equipment

When a fire breaks out sometimes all you have is mere minutes before your house is nothing but ashes, and by the time the fire department gets there all they can do to help requires them substituting their hoses for brooms. It is during the precious moments when you are waiting for the fire department to arrive that the automated water cannon comes in handy. The AWC is a remote controlled water cannon that pops up from underground when a fire is reported. It is remotely controlled by a firefighter that is off location. The source of the water comes from the underground water pipes that are already in place for fire hydrants. Once the fire is doused, or the fire fighters arrive on scene, the water cannon retracts back into the ground. This invention could save properties and lives by extending the time it takes for a house to burn to the ground.

The new detection system for forest fires - smoke alarm or thermometers?

In California alone, hundreds of thousands of acres are burned each year in devastating forest fire events.  These fires are due to lightning strikes, cigarettes, camp fires, and even some people that think its fun to just start a fire in a field of dead greass.  My point is, you can’t prevent it, just like smoking marijuana in America, it is going to happen no matter how much money you throw at it.  So the next step from prevention is reduction, how to reduce these forest fires?  How about some smoke detectors? … or thermometers?

Putting some smoke detectors around the forest that are hooked up to small photovoltaic cells for power could be the first step.  There are a few different types of smoke detectors, but I feel ionization detectors should do the trick.  These simply detect the amount of americium-241 in the air.  Using this system, a message can be relayed to the nearest fire department, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or whoever is in charge of keeping an eye out for these forest fires.

Of course you may be thinking of the obvious flaw: What about campers just making a camp fire.  Well, there will have to be some metrics that will determine if a cry for help should or should not be sent out.  It is in open air, so maybe if a certain amount of americium-241 is detected, then an alarm should be activated.

If that doesn’t please you, then the thermometer idea may float your boat.  The thermometer plan is pretty simple: if a thermometer reaches x degrees, then a possible fire is happening – call help.  You can even put these thermomters like 10 feet in the trees so no camp fire can reach it.

How to Keep Deer Away

One of the scariest things when driving is when you find yourself staring at a deer in your headlights as you are flying down the highway. There are millions of deer related accidents in the US every year; we need to get the deer off our main highways. That is why we have come up with the high frequency emitter, here’s how it works: The HFE will let out a high pitched noise inauditable to the human ear that will irratate and startle deer away. Emitters would be possitioned every half a mile or so on each side of the highway, and pointed in the direction of the woods. This invention could also be used by anyone looking to keep hungry deer away from their home gardens.