An Open Source Tricorder… How Cool is That?

More on the Tricorder front… this time, an Open Source Tricorder!

Star Trek-like open-source tricorder sees magnetic fields and more

“Know the near-magical hand held analysis gadgets known as ‘tricorders’ that everyone carries in Star Trek? A cognitive science researcher has created a real-world version.

‘The open source science tricorders that I’ve developed are very much a way to help people explore and feed their curiosity for the world,’ Peter Jansen, who created and built the gadget, told me today in an email.

Jansen recently earned his Ph.D. in in cognitive science from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he taught computers to learn language like babies do. He is currently at the University of Arizona working on high-tech sensors.

A person with that level of smarts, apparently, has enough brain power leftover in his spare time to invent tricorders, not to mention the greedlessness to share the blueprint with DIYers who want their own. Instructions are available from his Tricorder Project website.

Like the Trek devices, Jansen’s gadgets will measure the environment, things such as ambient temperature, humidity and magnetic fields, as well as take spatial readings for distance, location and even motion. They won’t, however, identify aliens for you.

The idea is to ‘help kids learn science at a conceptual level and ground abstract concepts like magnetism or polarization by providing a way to intuitively visualize them long before kids learn their mathematical formalisms,’ he said. (That’s the uber-academic term referring to the logic and structure of math.)”