A nifty tool for measuring up

I wish I had this sort of things a few decades ago:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/245093613/smart-scale-ruler

In the 1980's, I once was tasked with automating the DATCOM section on high lift devices. There were a pair of contractor/consultants who were apparently quite expensive, using the printed DATCOM (there was not a computerized version available back then) charts and figures to interpolate the lift and drag properties of a wing with flaps, in order to assist on the determination of the best design for what was supposed to be a stretch version of a business jet (for the record, this specific aircraft model was never released, deregulation allowed the prime intended customer to buy larger planes, essentially killing the market; but eventually, a stretch version of the biz jet was eventually made a decade later and turned into a commuter, but that is another story).

All those "manual" calculations were complex, imprecise, not repeatable; a better approach would be to digitize the charts and have a computer program interpolate the data, which was made and proved extremely robust and efficient. But the digitization process? That was a nightmare: reading charts and measuring point locations with a ruler calibrated to 1/100th of an inch, and then scaling the values according to the X and Y axis pitch was tedious. If there had been something like this Smart Scale Ruler back then, it would have been a lot easier.

Looking forward, I am wondering how many vintage plans, charts and figures are in need to be digitized and could benefit from such a tool.

All I know is that I got in line to get one, being an early supporter. If you think that your line of work could benefit from this (fishermen who like to lie about how big the fish the got was by making the scale read longer need not apply...) go visit the Kickstarter site and pledge quickly, before all the early bird discounts are gone.