People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets • Hacker News Board

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#31

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #5

Gas chromatography is being miniaturized with MEMS sensors, https://www.bronkhorst.com/int/blog/mems-technology-to-suppo... $50 spectrometers are already quite small, https://hackaday.io/project/143014-compact-25-spectrometer & https://www.tindie.com/products/onehorse/compact-as7265x-spe... If portable analyzers inspired by Star Trek's tricorder become affordable, the transparency goes in multiple directions, e.g. an…

I think the killer app here will be... literal apps. While I'd love a tricorder in the abstract sense, I don't really know what I'd do with it. There need to be useful applications before the hardware can take off - and that probably means software.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#32

Post by BiteCode_dev » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

I'm pretty sure that if a dog could read this, it would say "well... yeah, you didn't know that, guys ?".

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#33

Post by drummer » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

This is nothing compared to what people can learn about your magnetic field around your body. Aka "oura".

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#34

Post by NickNameNick » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #30

myself248 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CAT was branding a phone some time ago with a low-res thermal camera, but it was locked to some already-ancient version of Android and otherwise total lamesauce. Sad, because I'd buy one if it was just a normal phone plus IR. Presently I make do with a plug-in accessory module. I share your frustration. Consider a sled-backpack-case sort of thing with "all the missing sensors", instead of piecemeal accessories you ca…

You'd probably want the sensor pack to be separable from the phone case, so you can buy a new phone (whose shape changes every year, forcing new accessory purchases). I do think it's simultaneously cool and ridiculous that instead of just adding a simple distance sensor, companies making measurement software for phones double down on the software-only approach with computer vision.

Friend-of-a-friend was involved in this

https://ikegps.com/spike/

I think they licenced it to Stanley or similar.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#35

Post by sliken » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

hawaiian wrote: post #20

This is no secret to anyone who's owned a dog.

Heh, hard to imagine what a dog can smell. My wife started bringing treats from a particular restaurant. So when she would come home from that particular restaurant our normally polite dog would run and check her bag.

We thought it was the bag she smelled... until she left the bag outside in the car. Our dog smelled her, asked to be let out into the garage, asked to be let out into the driveway, then asked to be let into the car, and then nosed her bag.

We were amused.