In “Boulder Colorado” there is an Internet store named Spark Fun. This store sells all kinds of unusual electronic products.
I have previously purchased a very nice soldering iron from this company. This soldering - iron, is designed to solder very small parts on to a printed circuit board. The point on the iron is very small, about the size of a small nail point. The iron has a temperature sensor in the soldering iron tip. When the iron is not soldering, temperature remains at the proper solder melting temperature. When you melt solder, it draws heat from the tip. So the iron supplies more heating energy to keep it at a constant temperature.
I have never owned a soldering iron that solders this well. As a result, I often get on the Internet and look through the catalog items that are available from Spark fun. They have things that interest me like very small GPS devices, and gravity sensors that are useful in detecting whether something is level are not. Also you can get up in the morning and look at your gravity sensor to learn how heavy things are going to be that day.
The latest intriguing device that I've seen in the catalog is called a Pheromone sensor. “Pheromone sensor” is a fancy name for a smell sensor. What the device does is sniff the air and digitally describe the smell or scent it detects. The scents are like digital pixels. Each Pheromone speck has 3 scent chemicals that describe the smell, in the same way that red, green and blue describe color. The device measures the ratio of the three sent chemicals and counts the number of Pheromone specks that it smells in 1/10 sec. It sends this information over a wire pair once every 1/10 sec. This is wonderful, so I ordered one to build an electronic nose.
I can’t remember how many times I have marveled how our cat knows when I have petted some other cat or dog. She thoroughly sniffs me and seems to discover many wonderful things. There are no secrets, if you have a cat nose or a dog nose. That is why I bought the Pheromone sensor. I would have all the parts to build a new security scent sensor. Can you imagine what this would do for forensic science? Now we can photograph a suspect, gets his fingerprints and smell him, while he is robbing the bank.
I have 3 Texas Instrument eZ430-RF2500 Development kits. Each kit consists of a, battery - powered, remote sensor assembly and a second part that is, a base station data collection unit that plugs into the computer USB connector. Originally the remote sensor transmitted by radio, air temperature and battery voltage to the base station. The base station receives temperature and battery voltage and sends the information onto the computer, where the data is displayed on the screen, this is really a boring system, you sit there watching the air temperature and waiting for the battery to run down.
The only modifications required to build my remote nose system, was to connect the Pheromone sensor and change the program in the remote sensor. Now all I needed was some thing to sniff. And the perfect Pheromone emitters were the 3 kittens, Frank, Ladder, and Lady. They spend the morning and evening on our back porch eating kitten food. So we were sure that we had some stinkers to sniff. I sat up the remote nose on the back porch. It reliably transmitted from the porch up to my computer room. We ran the system for 2 days and collected a lot of good data.
The sparse instruction book, which came with the electronic nose, told how to separate scents into categories. The categories easily separated the kitten scents. Frank was clearly an N scent. Most of our data showed concentrated “Frank - N – scents”. I understand this is valuable stuff. Ladder was less predictable. During the day he was a faithful Ladder day scent. But at night he had a wild out cating in the dark scent. The little lady kitten was not recorded at all. We saw her but the system did not smell her. All we could conclude is that she has no scents at all. This is probably common in young girl cats.
Please do not forward this material to your friends. It is a work in progress and I need to clean it up. Oneta says that I also need to clean up the back porch. After doing more research, my plan is to submit the material to No Bull committee and receive prize money.
With the money I can purchase more stuff from Spark Fun.
This is not the No Bell committee from Oslo Norway. It is the No Bull committee from Rock Springs Wyoming.
Them cow-boys are big on science.
If you do not believe all this? Go to www.sparkfun.com
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