Powerchair: A dad hacks a wheelchair for his disabled 2-year-old son | Hacker News Reader

Powerchair: A dad hacks a wheelchair for his disabled 2-year-old son

hackingsma.com

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Just a random offer, I don't mean to hijack the thread - I do electronics and robotics design for a living. I will happily help anyone who has a need like this for cost of materials or less, the result will be open source hardware. If you or someone you know could use help with a similar project, contact me at kliment at 0xfb.com or on IRC (I'm Kliment on the freenode network).

I also do electronics for a living and dabble in robotics at the local hackerspace. Would love to work on an open-source project like this. Let me now if you get something going. Max at mmmaaa.xxx

From the comments of the father's blog there seems to be an organization for pairing up people with skills to people with needs: http://www.tetrasociety.org/

Thanks, though it appears to be North America only, and I'm in Europe.

I'd love to help out too (mechatronics eng) - email in profile. I'm in Perth, Australia

Amazing write up.

It does make me a bit grumpy to see things like SnapChat being offered $3bn, but nothing like this ever getting that kind of funding. That's a lot of engineering and manufacturing that isn't being done.

Even the boy with the formula one arm had to raise funds himself. (With help, but no funding, from Mercedes. But the engineering they gave is very cool.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/motorsport/formulaone/87006...

I completely agree; it's the same thing as with entertainment/sports industry. Football/basketball players are paid obscene amounts of money, while what they do does not have much real value.

Thanks for sharing the link.

"Football/basketball players are paid obscene amounts of money, while what they do does not have any real value."

Serious question: Do you consider entertainment to have a real value for society?

People would make their own entertainment if sports and Hollywood were not available: games, stories, conversation, crafts, and so on. Our lives might even be a bit richer for it.

And in that sense, the entertainment industry captures value that we would be making anyhow. Yes their entertainment is better somehow, better in the sense that people will pay for it, so this is the bottom-line "better", inclusive of demand generators (eg, movie trailers, team rivalries, etc), and not necessarily a general-welfare "better".

You might even argue that this is welfare-capture: once you have seen the movie trailer (for free), or acquired team-loyalty (for free), your welfare becomes dependent on seeing what happens (not free). My son saw a trailer for WALL-E last night. Now he wants to see it. Having seen it, will his net welfare have increased? I don't know. He seems happy enough with his blocks and pencils and such.

That is, in the sense in which cocaine is "better" than caffeine.

> People would make their own entertainment if sports and Hollywood were not available

I'm afraid I disagree with you. I notice even when getting together with a group of friends to play games, there always tends to be someone who is happy to just sit back and watch the games take place. Some will make the entertainment and others will want to watch. It seems to be basic human nature; professional sports and Hollywood have just figured out how to make money from that.

I have to ask - what games? We're months into a series of cut-throat games of Puerto Ruco and Power Grid (a new find). It's seriously competitive.

"Do you consider entertainment to have a real value for society?"

I thought we were talking about sports? Sports does not even have any entertainment value, it is a complete waste of time and resources

I'm far from a fan of any sport. I absolutely abhor the disparity between professional athletes earnings and the "working" class' earnings. And abhor even more the money spent on college football (e.g., the budget for our university library was being slashed so much that frequently used journals were having their subscriptions cut, while at the same time the football team got a new stadium and dorm). So I say this as a non-fan of sports - sports can definitely have entertainment value. Just like I'm a fan predominantly of sci-fi and comedy, but I really don't enjoy a lot of horror, people have different tastes in entertainmetn. Just because you and I may not have a taste for sports entertainment, that doesn't mean it isn't entertainment.

"And abhor even more the money spent on college football (e.g., the budget for our university library was being slashed so much that frequently used journals were having their subscriptions cut, while at the same time the football team got a new stadium and dorm)."

The irony is that at almost every university, the football team is a profit center, not a cost center. It' entirely likely that your library would have had deeper budget cuts without that football team.

So the hundreds of millions of people who line up and pay to watch sporting events each year are paying to not be entertained?

Clearly. The deeper question is why does our society value entertainment more than creation of other types of value?

Society has allowed copyright to extend virtually forever, while patents tend to last just 20 years. If you have money to invest in either industry with similar risk, which are you going to take a chance on? The one that will support you for life, and your family until the end of time, naturally. This indicates that we favour entertainment more than other types of intellectual property.

I realize people on here tend to be against property rights completely, but if we assume, for argument's sake, they are valuable for promoting creation as is the prevailing reason for having the system, shouldn't copyright be a far shorter period than patents?

Not really; time is hardly the only factor you should take into account.

Firstly, copyright is limited to a specific work, while patents are usually more generic - I can invent a whole new literary genre, but unless people copy the text or very specific elements of my work, they can do copycats all they like. With patents, a whole class of technologies is often monopolized.

Copyrighted works are also subject to strong novelty effects. While copyright itself lasts for ungodly accounts of time, the vast, vast majority of works will stop producing relevant income in just a couple of years, if that, while a patented invention doesn't usually suffer from those problems.

as far as society is concerned, professional athletes do have value - that value is realized in the form of ticket prices, memorabilia, endorsements, etc. And you can measure that in dollars, obviously. Keep in mind, these are professionals. There's only like 700-800 of them per professional league, and their athletic careers span 0-20 years. You could similarly do that calculation for hollywood too. That's the supply side. The demand side: it provides joy; it's entertaining, it's emotional, and fun. People pay for that, for the most part. Of course some people don't feel it;s worth paying for. that's fine too. But there's enough of the payers to sustain industries.

I do understand that and I agree. My point is that it's simply not fair that someone who is chasing the ball around the field/court gets 8-digit annual paycheck, while someone who helps solve real problems doesn't see a percent of that.

This touches a much deeper topic and won't most likely be related directly to the original post, so I'll stop here :)

"Why do professional athletes make so much money when...?" is the wrong question to ask.

"Why do people pay so much money for a small bit of entertainment for themselves when there is so much need in the world?" is a better one. This brings us right back to some uncomfortable facts about human nature.

No, it's stranger than that. People (myself included) think twice about a $5 app that will be used for a huge aggregate time, but don't hesitate at $20 for a cinema ticket to a craptastic film, or a subscription to some sort of sports channel. The app in using to write this cost me $6 and I have used it for way too many hours (and its one minor bug clipping comment length is still there damn it!)

You may be interested in this then. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~%20adamodar/New_Home_Page/invfab... It's a fascinating read and may relate to why people are willing to invest in seemly irrelevant markets.

> It does make me a bit grumpy to see things like SnapChat being offered $3bn

Supply and demand. The value that Snapchat provides to individuals and advertisers is tiny but huge in aggregate. There just isn't the same volume of people with conditions like Alejandro's and the variety of problems people face make the economics especially challenging within a free market.

However, I feel we're at a really exciting point in history. With open source software and hardware, the work that a single person like Alejandro's dad does can be provide value and spread like neither before. Advances in tech that seem to provide only minimal value to us allow for engineers to be trained, gain the skills and have the know how to make a significant difference to people like Alejandro.

The challenge is how can we channel as much of the value and tech created by the free market into problems that the free market struggles to solve, like disability and assistive technology. Open question!

I really burst into tears when I first saw it. This is really fascinating how a dad worked hard to make his child every day life easier. I can understand his effort as father of disabled child and very proud of achievement he made. It is hard to believe how hard to reach resources for a disabled child. Some European countries has very good regulations about supporting disabled children thus equipment is very expensive. It is impossible to effort for families with low income and social benefits which are provided especially from government agencies is a must.

> Some European countries has very good regulations about supporting disabled children thus equipment is very expensive.

Regulations, at least the well intentioned ones, try to avoid accidents from ill-designed products. The downside is expensive or never made technology needed by a small number of patients.

After all, dead or injured children due to faulty machinery are very noticeable, whereas unassisted ones (because the technology doesn't exist) is just "a fact of life", and invisible to most (except their parents). "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen", again.

Same with medicines.

We need a two-tier system: 1) certified and expensive, and 2) best-effort and on your own, but cheap.

(And don't let me get started on patents)

This is where the value of Stem educations come in. 50 years ago you could pick up enough mechanics to fix your car, enough electronics as a hobbyist. today you need to start at 14 building / making at school like we did in woodcraft and metalwork lessons - otherwise when you are a dad and need those making skills, they just aren't there

but like everyone else on the thread - massive kudos - that's what dads are for.

In case you don't know what "MAX" is:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/71544521BDE34FFB86256...

Its something I'd like really like to see an open source version of make it into the Arduino universe.

Epitome of Father-Child relationship. Moved to tears. Thanks for sharing.

At one point in the video he seemed to be looking at the camera, saying perhaps, thanks for being an awesome dad.

BTW, I think the reason why there's so much talk about entertainment in the comments is because people feel guilty for pursuing simple pleasure when you have pursued something so noble by comparison. What they don't know is how much satisfaction you must have derived from this project. You have achieved something not many of us have, something noble and satisfying. There should be a website for noble stories like yours, but I'm afraid there wouldn't be enough content ;)

Thank you for sharing your inspiring story.

I would like to contribute money for Alejandro (as I do not have the hacking ability/skills to contribute anything meaningful for the tech). Is there a way to contribute money for Alejandro and his dad?

Pure Love

Just imagine what a Gene Hacker Dad can do...

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