A brief demonstration of my Titanium Cyborg Eye as a flashlight [video]
tiktok.com
tiktok.com
As mentioned in the video, there are other designs, e.g.: https://www.tiktok.com/@bsmachinist/video/710602314370956011... (terminator). Profile page with more videos: https://www.tiktok.com/@bsmachinist .
(Both assumes you have an adblocker of course)
>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
As bragr points out, the HN guidelines ask for the main link to be to the original source. Alternate links are welcome in the comments.
Putting a battery inside your eye socket seems incredibly risky to me, though. Especially one that can power a bright light like this for a while...
On the other hand, every mirror would be a great chance to lose your other eye as well, so maybe disregard my ideas.
At those power levels? Probably every surface in general. A beam powerful enough to light a match or burn through a balloon is powerful enough for the diffuse reflection off a table or wall to blind you.
Wait..
One cool use, IMO, would be a time of flight distance-measuring laser: With only a single working eye, OP lacks binocular vision for distance measuring. With the equivalent to a Bushnell rangefinder, they could stare at an object, blink twice, and hear a tiny voice literally in their head say "37.84 meters".
Heck, the old skool 1st/2nd ACs in the camera department would kill for this. No need to "pull tape" any more.
Would probably require some kind of crazy training for it to work. Plus I have no clue what I’m talking about!
With great powers comes great responsibility.
The other problem is that this small battery won't have that much current capacity
I have some laser pointers capable of lighting matches. They get hot.
We already do this with pacemakers
Whether it is worth it for a cool gadget, is another question.
Pacemakers are typically lithium iodide which do not have the same risk of uncontrolled burning (that's the nickel variety).
But also, the pacemaker sits outside the body with probes going inside. You'd not want another surgery just to change a battery.
There used to be nuclear-powered pacemakers that could last many lifetimes but nowadays the doctors say it's better to replace the whole thing every once in a while, so the nuclear option is overkill.
"The History of Nuclear Powered Pacemakers" - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/
> Despite the often longer life-expectancies, nuclear pacemakers quickly became a part of the past when lithium batteries were developed. Not only did the technology improve, allowing for lighter, smaller, and programmable pacemakers, but doctors began to realize that this excessive longevity of nuclear pacemakers was excessive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device says betavoltaic "devices include a 100 μW tritium-powered device weighing 20 grams".
That's about 5x the weight of a glass eye - https://www.muellersoehne.com/907.html .
Assuming linear scaling, an energy budget of 2μW isn't going to provide much light.
You could use the 2μW to charge up a capacitor for 24 hours and then have a minute and a half of 2mW, which is enough for a visible laser pointer reaching a few meters. 2mW light output is quite a bit brighter than that but requires more like 20mW power input.
A 220 μF cap at 48 volts would hold 35 hours of 2μW, and there are ceramic caps that big that would easily fit into your eyeball.
How much does that weigh? How big is it? What's the leakage current?
If it takes enough space away from the betavoltaic device, and thus reduces the power generation, then the cap will never fully charge.
Not knowing what you're thinking of, I picked https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/427/134d-1763800.pdf mostly arbitrarily. Note that I'm a programmer, not a hardware person.
The lightest weights 2.6 g, which is 1/2 the weight of the eyeball, so cuts the power generation to 1μW.
I think it's telling me there's a 10μA leakage current, which I think means the cap will power up to 0.1V before the leakage rate matches the power rate.
Now that you know my level of ignorance, what's your take?
Leakage current usually increases superlinearly with voltage, though. If the tantalum's DC leakage is 10 μA at 50 volts, it's probably closer to 0.1 μA at 5 volts.
In capacitors with a given dielectric, the maximum energy is proportional to the volume of the dielectric, so although a 47 μF cap charged to 108 volts stores the same energy as a 220 μF cap charged to 50 volts, it also needs the same volume.
(I'm not an EE either; I only play one on HN.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye says an adult human eyeball is about 23.7 mm × 24.2 mm × 23.4 mm, and a spheroid like that is π/6 of the corresponding cuboid, so you only have about 7.03 cc to work with.
So probably you'd have to settle for under 1 cc of capacitor, which (in the case of X7R anyway) means storing more like 15 seconds of 2 mW.
It might get a bit annoying when you want to go to sleep though.
2 cd/m2 * (7mm * 7mm * pi) = 0.00030787608 candelas = 307 µ candela.
Doesn't seem like much light.
Anyway, your statement about the pacemaker sitting outside the body with probes going inside is not correct; maybe it once was, but that was decades ago.
They can implant basically under the fat layer or under the pectoral muscle. Beneath the fat layer is easier both from a surgery and recovery standpoint, but less secure.
The downside of that is that it's possible for the device to flip over. They usually try to avoid securing the device to anything because that can lead to discomfort or pain if the device wants to move around, but they can if they have to.
And yes, they do have to repeat surgery to replace the device when the battery gets low. The leads AIUI are usually a lifetime part (hopefully for all the right reasons). For defibrillators, battery life will be maximized if the device doesn't have to deliver shocks and can stick to just pacing. It turns out if they implant a defibrillator, you get a pacemaker for free.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-heart-pacemaker-dc-id...
This introduces an opening into the body that will almost certainly result in infection.
Probably much less risky to periodically change the battery than get the portal infected
Would you rather have a battery in your eye socket catch fire and explode, or one in your pants pocket/on your wrist?
A scaled-up version of this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ3K0suY1Dc
To provide more power to the led you probably need a bigger coil inside the eye, it should work if you hide the induction transmission loop inside a hat.
I guess it might not matter much because the battery is so small that you’d be lucky to get more than a handful of minutes running that LED at max power.
This is all speculation based on a 30 second video though.
I mean...isn't it effectively water cooled?
All I know is my headlamp gets mighty hot when it is running at peak intensity. Like hard to touch levels of hotness.
But if it was a lightweight memory device with wireless connection to all devices of mine nearby. This would be neat
https://petapixel.com/2016/01/25/eyeborg-the-man-who-replace...
I am both excited and horrified, because that universe is pretty dark. I suppose I should be thanking our lucky stars we are not moving towards 40k universe.
I really doubted for awhile that it would be so damn cyberpunk and so damn predictable. Than I saw stable diffusion and realized the "enhance" scene from blade runner was simply prophetic...
Now granted, it’s a 6 figure device, but still, I’m really impressed whenever SotA body replacement parts come up.
(got one)
But then, the first time I met him, was at Wacken 2007. The legs could do nothing but walking at a measured pace (though I thought that was still pretty impressive), and had to be recharged every evening.
I have 2 RFID implants and I don't mention it to most people because I have genuinely gotten bad reactions from even other software engineers.
It's a pretty minor 'modification' but people get really weirded out about non-medical implanted tech.
> Brian S (Creator): Nope not at all. LED's do not emit much heat and the Titanium body of the eye offers great heat shielding from any heat emitted.
[https://www.tiktok.com/@bsmachinist/video/713267837541158430...]
Being titanium doesn’t mean anything - here the heat has to go somewhere eventually. Either out of the front of the eye where it’s “uninsulated” or it’ll get hot enough internally that the body will get warm.
Honestly the heat thing was the first I thought of too. It would nice if the dude goes into more detail about it because I’m sure it is one of the top questions asked.
This is a pretty confident answer, but I think you miss the point of the titanium. It can act as a heat battery and slowly let it dissipate all around vs a focused point of heat.
I think water is also a better thermal insulator if you can keep it from convecting, and a better heat spreader (to eliminate "a focused point of heat", which I agree is a problem) if you do let it convect. But that's the opposite of titanium being a good heat shield.
He probably has to weigh the chance for water to mix with the components vs a simple titanium hunk of metal. I guess that's what materials engineers are for?
No, I didn't provide numbers on thermal conductivity, just specific heat, though it is now unfashionable to call it that.
Yes, putting some water inside the titanium would increase the thermal mass of the overall assemblage, and I don't know of anything that would work better than water for this. This would reduce the temperature to which the eye-socket tissue is heated by intermittent but high-intensity LED usage, reducing the risk of burns, because it smooths it out over time. If the LED is not at the top of the eye, or if the eye rotates, liquid water would also help to smooth it out over space.
However, to minimize the temperature to which the eye-socket tissue is heated, it would also be beneficial to interpose thermal insulation between the tissue and the heat source, such as a thick layer of teflon around the outside of the eyeball (or saline-solution-soaked teflon foam). This will slow heat transfer from the hot eyeball to the eye-socket tissue, giving blood flow more time to convect away the waste heat and thus producing a lower temperature in the sensitive tissue.
I think the more important issue here is that he's using low enough power with a low enough duty cycle that it isn't much of a problem.
Yeah, I think debating whether water or titanium is a more effective heat battery ignores the fact that titanium is obviously good enough, and there are plenty of reasons he might have preferred to construct the thing out of titanium, such as the fact that it looks cool.
I obviously haven’t done the math and don’t have access to the data that would allow me to, but I suspect that for this application, you’d have to have an extremely compelling reason to complicate design and manufacturing with such an approach.
The question is how hot will it get for some amount of LED on-time.
The comment was confident and correct, but not accounting for the whole picture. Couple that with a level of snarkiness, and it's a classic internet comment that makes the internet worse IMHO.
I'm always reminded of that comment on hackernews that shits on dropbox when it was launched. It was correct and of course dropbox was "trivial" to copy using a couple of commands, but it misses the point.
Unlikely. Light appeared to be around 5 lumens maybe requiring about 0.05A. If directly driven with 3.7V, then it's 0.185W. If he gets 20 hours of light, cell capacity @50mA is 1Ah, which seems close enough for the battery size, though maybe a little high, so LED draw is probably a bit less than 50mA and 0.1W, no where near 2W.
Imagine being able to go back and relive memories from your perspective. ML could be used to automatically caption and bookmark significant events for searchability.
You can replay any moment in your life that your eyes saw or your ears heard... but so can the government.
The first video in the GP proxied: https://proxitok.pabloferreiro.es/@bsmachinist/video/7157587...
Proxy info: https://github.com/pablouser1/ProxiTok
(Not the creator of it but a user of it)
Nitter and Teddit have become near full replacements for twitter and reddit for me. I don't know if they can last but I love services like this without dark patterns.
I am already on the fence regarding long videos. They are a rarely paying off time investment next to reading the equivalent article.
Short videos are an immediate no from me. It’s never worth the investment. Realistically if it could be written in a script fitting a TikTok video it’s not going to go deeply into anything.
If you are trying to show a repeatable process, whether that's just DIY or microbiology, a video is dramatically better than an article.
My abject hatred of TikTok stems from who controls it.
These probably aren't the top of the complaint list for most social media and content distribution platforms so I'm not saying these are reasons to consider Bytedance in a different category than Google or Facebook but they are worth knowing about.
I'm sorry but there is no accountability in US, there are price tags.
Well, thank goodness we're all managing to retain some perspective and not just descending into performative melodrama.
When it comes to negative impact on humanity, Meta seems far more hate-worthy. And it's not like this list is particularly short (e.g. nearly every venture a16z is involved in seems like it should get a spot).
Heck, even HN isn't without sin.
If I were to judge TikTok solely on its own merits as a service then I would just be sitting at a "smoldering disdain" with perhaps a dash of sadness for modern preoccupation with frequent dopamine hits.
I mean it’s a cool idea and tech spirit, but the form… raised eyebrows
TikTok is the most public and effective social espionage campaign ever devised or put into practice.
Tiktok isn’t special when it comes to collecting data.
All this data goes to a centralized surveillance capitalism organization controlled by an authoritarian foreign power.
https://lr.riverside.rocks/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_...
If you -must- view Tiktok content, consider ProxiTok which is an open source frontend that removes most tracking.
Especially not the meta kind, please. Meta is the crack of internet forums.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33316063.