Glowing Cables
This is the first post that belongs to a newly created category called ‘Ideas’. These are things that I’d work on if I had the knowledge and/or capital (and if they were even possible).
This idea came to me after dealing with cat5 cables in a rack of servers. It seems there are two fighting forces. The first is that we’d like the cat5 cables to be out of the way of anything else we might want to do. Secondly, it’d be nice to have an effecient way to isolate any given cable from the rest. So, for example, I might have one end of a cat5 cable and want to know where the other end of it is.
It’d be nice to have some sort of handheld device that when touching any part of a cable would cause the cable to glow, flicker, change color, or anything else that would clearly visually differentiate this particular cable from any other cable. My vague notion of this is that cables would have to sheathed in some extra outer layer that would respond to this handheld device. Of course if we could do away with the handheld device that’d be even better (i.e., this outer layer senses the touch of a finger like a touchpad).
Is possible without drastically increasing the size or price of cables?
There are alreday tools that do this quite well. The tools has two parts, one that attaches to the cable you wish to identify and a handheld wand you pass over the other end of the cable. When you’re over the correct cable an alarm goes off.
carlos
29 Jan 06 at 5:43 pm
Neat, what are they called? Can you point me to any? Thanks.
Luke
29 Jan 06 at 6:29 pm