Do you remember that scene in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home where Scotty teaches an engineer how to make the future technology of transparent aluminum? Canadian scientist Peter Jansen didn’t need a man from the future to show him how to make things from Star Trek when he built himself a tricorder. More specifically, a dual-screen science tricorder based on designs from Star Trek: The Next Generation, capable of capturing an array of atmospheric, electromagnetic, and spatial data. On the show, tricorders were an expository plot device, giving crew members whatever information they might need to overcome a situation. Jansen’s device isn’t quite that magical, but it can tell the temperature and has SONAR. If you want to make your own tricorder, Jansen has put all the open source plans up on his website.
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Jansen’s tricorder isn’t the first piece of technology to be called that. Thanks to a clause in Gene Roddenberry’s contract with Desilu Productions, if you can make the fictional technology on the show actually function, you get to call it by the show’s name. The first “real” tricorder was the TR-107 from Vital Technology Corporation in 1996, and it could scan EM radiation, temperature, and barometric pressure. Since then, the TR-107 has been followed by a series of other devices and smartphone apps, although none quite as sophisticated as Jansen’s device. As cool as it is, Jansen’s tricorder isn’t even close to being advanced enough to qualify for Qualcomm’s $10 million Tricorder X-Prize. The semiconductor giant is sponsoring a contest to create a working facsimile of Star Trek’s medical tricorders, where physical ailments can be diagnosed with a quick scan.
Perhaps the most amazing part of Jansen’s tricorder is that the housing was made using 3D printers, which are about as close as you can get to real life replicators as modern technology allows. We may not have invented warp speed travel or teleportation yet, but who would have figured in 1966 just how prophetic the Star Trek franchise would be?
“heeeeeeeeello computer……”