What ideas or inventions have you made up?

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Any good ideas?

Look at the display of most high-quality digital multimeters, and you will see a bar-graph that tracks the numerical values being displayed.  I invented that, using an 8 kHz time-base, an absolute-value converter, a comparator, and a shift-register directly driving the display.  Most bar-graph displays before then used multiple comparators and convoluted digital logic to drive the display.  They were slow, expensive, and not a good fit for hand-held devices.  Now a decent bar-graph display can be built-in to commercial multimeters for about $12 worth of parts.

It did not make me wealthy, but it did solidify my reputation in the industry as an innovator and problem-solver.

During my grad school days, I created and analyzed thirty new compounds for my dissertation. I had enough information on them to produce three scientific journal articles, but instead buried them in my dissertation to spite my ex-advisor. He wanted to ride on my hard work when he did not contribute to it. I designed the compounds on my own after his attempts to destroy my research projects under his guidance. I will only tell you that the compounds have very specific uses that may be potentially valuable for nano-computer chips.

I do not like to give out “free” ideas that can be scooped out from under me when it involves research. I had that happen in grad school with a project and I learned a valuable lesson from it. The project was stolen from me by classmates and used to get someone their PhD. They had zero creativity in science and no capability to do the work on their own. Cheating others that way will only get you so far in life. I await the future hand of fate to turn on them when they least expect it.

↑ Have you ever read  PhD Comics ?

Even though I never went for a PhD, almost every panel seems weirdly familiar, as if I had left the webcam on.

My resume used to be just a list of novel things I'd made that worked the first time. One was a big custom clamp that let me do a job alone that had previously taken two men. I often found ways to save on material, even in common situations.
I demonstrated that a land vehicle chassis does not need separate parts for an excellent suspension system. All it needs is the right shapes, with controlled flexibility in the right places.
I made pedal boats that won races right off the drawing board.
Now, I'm working on a Copernican Revolution in the social sciences.

There is one idea I can talk about. Back in the early 2000s, I was working on a side project to make a rechargable battery. So what right? Well, the one I was designing was made of a very special type of plastic that could harvest sunlight and retain it as a stored charge until needed. In other words, a very lightweight solar power rechargeable battery that was only made of two components. I figured someday a battery company would want to buy it from me (to prevent it from destroying their market for small batteries).

MIT later reported making one, but it needed two more heavy components to work and had a problem retaining the charge over time. My design would have potentially fixed that issue internally.

Part of the fun with inventing is to be creative where others are not.

Back in the 1970s I made a multi-track tape recorder out of ordinary domestic tape recorders and a few extra bits and pieces. I didn't invent multi-track recorders of course, but I'm the only person I know of who made one that way, and it was obviously a lot cheaper than buying a studio recorder. The sound quality was a bit limited but it worked. I recorded tons of music on it, playing all the instruments myself.

About a year or so ago I made a water bath for making dough rise. The wholemeal flour I use for baking bread didn't rise very well even in the warmest reasonable place in the house, so I set up this bath using a plastic box, a small plug-in water heater, a fishtank water pump (for circulating the water) and a horticultural probe thermostat. The dough rises as much as I need it to within an hour if I have the bath set to 44 Centigrade. Before that I was just using a container of warm water, but that was tedious because it cooled down over time and I had to keep adding hot water to keep it warm enough. Thermocirculator water baths aren't my own invention, most laboratories have them, though they're expensive. They make breadmaking "machines" but I suspect the affordable ones don't give as much control as mine does.

I found downloading music off the Web tedious because on the websites I use, I have to do several clicks to download one track. So I wrote a macro to download entire albums automatically. It works very well and I've got tons of music that I'd never have otherwise had the patience to download.

I wrote a program that compares the contents of 2 different drives and creates a list of all the files that are unique to one drive. I have a lot of files and I store them in duplicate on 2 archive drives (because if I only had one drive then I'd lose everything if the drive packed up), and most of the programs that copy files from one drive to another sometimes fail to copy everything without providing a log of which ones failed - Windows drag-and-drop is always doing that - and it's easy to get into a muddle and lose track of what's been duplicated and what hasn't. There are lots of duplicate-finding programs around, but mine is the only reliable uniques finder that I know of.

I created some music mp3s at a range of tempos from MIDI tunes. I use them in an mp3 player to self-regulate the speed at which I pedal when I'm using the exercise bike. It's a bit more fun than using a metronome. Using music to regulate the speed of marching isn't new, but I don't know of anybody using it for an exercise bike.

I made a calculation in Excel that saved taxpayers $ 35 million a year...

... that's just about it...

... not exactly equivalent to the discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson...

... and I guess someone else than me will have to discover the even more elusive massless spin-2 particle...

I recently invented 2 games. One is called "Shape Counters" and the other is called "Roll a Rainbow." "Shape Counters" is a card game and "Roll a Rainbow" is a dice game. I now have my own website and I am working on a kickstarter campaign so that I can begin production on these.