One of the most beautiful things about the state of electrical and computer engineering today is that we’ve reached a point where anybody with the knowledge and desire to create something, can. Even this guy, Dr. Peter Jansen, currently a post-doc at Arizona State University, who recently decided to build a working tricorder, that nifty diagnostic gadget that the characters from Star Trek are always pointing at things. And he’s making it open source, so that anyone else with the gumption, desire, and a LINUX operating system can build one too.It’s not the first attempt to replicate the fictional instrument but Jansen’s device stands out. Other than bearing a similar aesthetic resemblance to the tricorder on Star Trek, his model is the first that is actually remotely functional.Jansen’s latest model, the Mark II Tricorder (Mark 1 was less sophisticated, Mark 3 was shelved, and the plans for the Mark IV have yet to be completed) is able to gather and present information on climate-related stats such as temperature, magnetic fields, humidity and atmospheric pressure. And in the true spirit of open source and community knowledge building, the prints, and source code are readily available.The device is still in its infant stages and god knows how people will tweak this thing once they start building prototypes of their own. At any rate, Jansen’s tricorder still has one major advantage over the slightly more sophisticated models in Star Trek: it’s real.
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