If you have a new product idea, let us know here!
I’m sure many people know the Apple Magic Trackpad. Right-handed people place it to the right of the keyboard. The Raspberry Pi 400 PC has the GPIO interface on the right. I am sure that many very young people will use the Pi 400 PC as their first computer. What if a trackpad via GPIO interface was placed to the right of the Pi PC in the “Pi design”? An extended meaningful use of the GPIO interface.
My suggestion for an extension would be to add on a Nrf24l01 transceiver to ad low power networking capabilities. All the libraries to implement networks using that device are already in the Arduino library lists available from Github.
There is a need for a low cost, high power, pulsed laser module for longer distance LIDAR and range finding in the maker market. Osram recently came out with a low cost (US $61) quad diode module (part number SPL S4L90A_3 A01) that puts out up to 480 Watts while being pulsed at 1 to 100 nanoseconds. If you could package this module with a simple lens with a beam expander to create a useable beam divergence of about 1 to 2 millirad that would be great. Initial beam size could be 3 to 7mm.
And then create a simple pulse driver board that will drive the lasers with a high speed FET (SiC maybe) at a selectable pulse length of 10 to 100 ns. The board should run on 12VDC for possible vehicle applications.
The board would create a delay after each pulse to meet the duty cycle requirement of the Osram laser (.01%). Because of the very short pulse length, the beam expander and the low duty cycle this laser would be eye-safe. Of course one should never stare into any laser, even a toy laser pointer.
There is nothing like this on the market for the maker. I can think of several applications for this in a LIDAR system and I know it would be very popular.