Owen the Inventor

All my life I've known what I wanted to be: an inventor. But I've wanted it so desperately, and been so afraid that I couldn't have it, that I've created a funny kind of ambivalence over the years. I would get excited and start pursuing an idea, only to abandon it and stop all activity for months when I ran into an obstacle. In my earlier years, this didn't bother me too much because I was young, and I was sure I'd figure everything out sometime later. Now I'm 27 and still working in a field other than inventing, and I'm enjoying it less and less every day. It's very clear to me that unless I do something in a consistent, intentional way, there's no way my life is magically going to change course.

So what do I have? I never went to engineering school, product design school, or business school. I don't have much spare cash to pay for engineers, designers, or business people, although I do have a little. I have a degree in film, lots of experience in IT and the SF corporate video industry, and lots of ideas. I have a good amount of experience in construction and building things, and have very basic experience with soldering circuits. I also have a wonderful girlfriend, Kerry, who loves me and wants me to be the best I can be, and I have a number of friends and acquaintances in various fields that could help me on my quest.

What do I want? I ultimately want to have a team of intelligent and talented designers and engineers who create awesome products. I want a "bat cave" like Bruce Wayne where the sky is the limit as far as what can be created. And I want to make things that allow people to be happier, feel better, enjoy life more, and experience less frustration and discomfort. I want more love, connection, happiness, and abundance for myself and for the world. And I want to make a ton of money.

What am I going to do right now? I'm going to start from square one and make a consistent effort to progress. I have a bunch of ideas, from perforated hamburger wrappers to traffic jam drones to vibrating smoothie pitchers, but as long as they remain as ideas, they're worthless. To move forward, I need to actually make something, but it needs to be both interesting enough to be worth doing and simple enough to do myself or with limited help. No modeling in SolidWorks, calculating fluid dynamics, or getting UL certified. After unhappily putting the vibrating pitcher on hold because of those very issues, I arrived at an idea I think I can do: an automatic shower controller.

I live in a house with several people, and when I take a shower, I always run the risk of getting doused with cold or hot water if someone turns on a sink or another shower. When that happens, I have to frantically mess with the hot and cold knobs until I can get the temperature back to what I want. Then when they turn off the sink, I have to do it again. Sometimes it happens several times in a row. Not a world-ending phenomenon, but something that would be great to take on as an inventor. I'm pretty sure I can do this with an Arduino, a temperature sensor, and some servo motors.

Now, to avoid taking on too much at once, I'm breaking this into several parts. The first part will just be to sense the temperature of the water. Pretty simple. I've already got an Arduino and my $2 sensor is coming in the mail any day now. I'll get a coupler to fit between the pipe and the shower head, and I'll embed the sensor into it.

I've also started reading inventor blogs! One of the first things I read was to do a lot of work in the early stages to determine how feasible your idea is - before you invest a lot of time and money. I made the mistake of not doing this with the last idea I tried to build. My dad and I invested a couple thousand dollars into patents, only to realize once I started testing it that my idea wasn't going to work. That sucked. I'm not going to make that mistake this time. However, that means that I have to find out if I can use servos to twist my shower knobs. I'll report back once I have some kind of answer.