Re: TIRA is junk - AVOID IT!

Thanks! I'll check it out.

-- Bobby G.

Search on "QProx".

Yes. It might be do-able. I've got to read up a lot more. I was thinking that a 12V autodialer might work with a cellphone if the tones are loud enough. That might be the simplest thing to do and it would make the problem one of getting the phone to go on/off hook. There's so much progress going on in cell phone technology that it's going to take an effort to catch up. Bluetooth and a PIC are probably the most reliable tools.

Even more complicated is the I-bot stair climbing wheelchair.

I agree that it's likely to make things worse instead of better, shutting down the system in a pre-tip mode. Still, I'd like to have that information in a telemetry readout along with battery charge state, temperature of the controller box, location of the chair, a weight sensor that tells me if he's sitting in the chair and other things. Sort of home automation transposed to a scooter. :-)

Again, it would be nice to add that kind of control. I'll try to add in what I can or at least leave room to implement it later on.

-- Bobby G.

There's a lot of stuff out there that does exactly this but lots of it is terribly pricey. I've got lots of suggestions and places to look for pre-existing solutions to the problem. I wonder if one of the devices that allows you to hook your cellphone up to your home's phone wiring might not be the best way to interface the phone to a larger dialing keypad that also had speed dial numbers.

-- Bobby G.

There's an article in today's Washington Post that is indirectly related to this topic.

[...]

I haven't read the whole thread (bad me) so i don't know your "geezer's" capabilities... but a simple approach to the tilt problem is to have it cut off based on certain tilt parameters, but with an override switch that would let them operate it if, as you say, they needed to get out of trouble. Perhaps that might be too much to grasp... I've known folks who didn't grasp using the mouse on a computer.

Actually, we did a very similar thing, programming all numbers Dad would ever need to call into the cell phone's memory. I could go back and stick ICE before all the critical entries, but then they wouldn't sort out in alpha order and all the of cryptically abbreviated names would be four characters shorter. Everything's a bloody trade-off!

-- Bobby G.