I created a similar product almost 10 years ago, I had a provisional patent filed and showed it off to some very nice and smart people at Thermo Fisher. I wanted to license the patent to people that actually know how to build laboratory equipment (I don’t hold a higher degree in anything). I should’ve continued trying to license but they convinced me that was the wrong move.
I formed a company and got $50k in grant money from the state of Wisconsin along with incubator space and advisors. I did all the initial software and hardware development, the first one I built took components from a battery powered toothbrush to inductively charge so I didn’t need a charging port exposed to solutions.
I loved working on this project, I had the idea after having frustrating experiences working with 30 year old lab equipment that took up more bench space in the lab than my backpack did. At the end of the day that’s all it was. I had no idea wtf I was doing and the company eventually folded as real life became too much to juggle with my project. I figured I could use the same form factor to build tons of different sensors based on the many different ion selective electrodes already on the market. Eventually I needed to try and manufacture these sensors myself in a form factor that would fit inside flasks in the lab.
Letting this project fall by the wayside is probably the single greatest regret of my life. I often think back about how different things could’ve turned out if only I had made the correct decisions and executed properly and actually found someone to license my patent… so it goes.
Ben, West & I worked on this project in 2014. We filed a provisional patent as well, reached out to potential licensees, and had a handful that wanted to pull the trigger to turn it into a functioning product. E.g. here was the sell sheet [1].
Unfortunately, our "day jobs" at Google[x] got in the way -- they weren't particularly keen to have researchers pursuing side gigs, even if Google had no interest in pursuing it themselves & the IP was cleanly produced externally. They refused to sign off on a clean IP waiver, so the licensing discussions fell apart.
At the end of the day: It was a good, viable idea that we wanted to exist. Never anticipated that it would be all that lucrative -- the volume & profit margins were likely low.
Ha! That’s awesome and super close to the same time I was working on this! My phone is dating my first “working” test as Dec 22 2013. Managed to swirl the water around a little bit and successfully transmit the pH back to my computer before the whole thing flooded and shorted itself out XD.
You guys were smart and went RFID (I went Bluetooth) which means you skip the whole battery and battery charging steps and also avoiding another flaw of my design which was it’s narrow working temperature range. Turns out sticking a lipo battery in a flask of boiling water isn’t exactly a good idea lol. It also gives you another product to offer as an “RFID enabled hot plate” as opposed to just working in existing hot plates. Temperature of solution is an important variable to determining an accurate pH reading so temp was more of an incidental feature for me.
My vision was having a whole tray of these stir bars: one for pH, one for nitriles, one for nitrates, etc. anything that already had an ion selective electrode that was capable of measuring concentration would, in theory, just plug right in to that form factor. Ion selective electrodes are essentially just tiny batteries whose output voltage varies proportionately to the concentration of the ion on the outside of the glass. They’re super cool pieces of hardware just by themselves.
I was a student at a local community college at the time working on my liberal arts degree and guaranteed transfer to a state school. It makes me wonder how many others in the world might have a working prototype stuffed in their closet too :)
It sucks Google killed it for you, I thought my little community college might try and come after me for similar claims if I used any of their facilities of faculty to help with the development so I avoided the place like the plague while working on it to minimize my perceived risk. I can’t imagine my level of paranoia if it woulda been Google.
If you ever want to reach out and commiserate about working on this project I’d love to hear from you :) I’ve got all sorts of funny stories associated with mine. After a couple of bad project demos we started stuffing our stir bar in condoms and tying them off to avoid leaks into the prototype. I got plenty of sideways looks when I pulled out a box of Trojans and crack one open while trying to show off what the thing does to people around the hacker space XD throwing my email in my profile right after I submit this.
Hi, my email is in my profile if you care to connect. I started an apprenticeship as an electrician at the age of 27. I received my Journeyman's card at 31 - Funny thing is that here in FL, there is next to no benefit in having a journeyman card unless you are using it as a stepping stone to a Master's license. There was a severe building slump when I got my card, so i figured it was a good time to go back to school full time. ( I had been going part time while working as an electrician.) Now quite a few years later .... Hell, not gonna bore everyone. Anyhow, give me a yell if you feel like it.
Such an elegant solution. This method could also be used to embed similar things.
How about humidity sensors embedded inside buildings? Like, the builder could throw a couple of them into a wall when they build it, and trivial to scan and measure the temperature or internal humidity level inside the wall (or other equipment, maybe industrial equipment) during routine inspections.
This is being done in the “high performance” home building space. I don’t think it’s standard practice, but it gets talked about on the Fine Home Building podcast a decent amount
I'm surprised there isn't a single-chip solution to this...
Almost every nontrivial chip has a temperature sensor inside (used for temperature compensation of factory calibrated stuff). I expect RFID chips are no different.
Can't you just get an off the shelf NFC memory chip or something, then figure out what combination of register reads are necessary to read it's internal temperature sensor?
NFC chips don’t have any need for temperature data, so a temperature sensor and the necessary blocks to convert it to digital wouldn’t be a priority for a cost reduced NFC design.
NFC gear is low bandwidth and low power. They don’t need to monitor temperature like you would in a high performance CPU or memory chip.
When calibrated they're usually far better than that. Just they normally aren't factory calibrated because temperature sensing isn't the primary purpose of the chip and calibrating temperature sensors is very expensive at scale (have fun heating up every wafer to a very precise 100C and cooling it down to -40C just to record temperature sensor output).
Having said that, single point calibration is cheap to do (just calibrate at room temp) and pretty effective.
Heck, you need more accuracy than that for a proper cup of tea or coffee.
That level of accuracy would also be useful in candy making, a secret hobby of mine. The cheap thermometers tend to have that margin of error and are pretty terrible at showing just how uneven the heat in a pan can be but I am not sure ic that has more to do with the sensors sensitivity or the refreshing on the cheap LCD display they tend to put on them.
> Heck, you need more accuracy than that for a proper cup of tea or coffee.
No, 2 degrees C is about the right accuracy you need for a "proper" cup of tea or coffee. You'll lose that much heat in the transfer from kettle to cup. Inaccuracy of 5 degrees C in brewing will be indistinguishable for most people.
Precision also has a placebo effect. Coffee or tea will taste better to you if you put a lot of work into it.
> Coffee or tea will taste better to you if you put a lot of work into it.
This is very true but, tangentially, this is the opposite when you make drink/food for others. I found that you get the best effect when you spend a lot of effort to cook and perfect the dish but when asked, you have to pretend you basically winged it and it wasn't a hassle
In chemistry it is usually fine, in microbiology it can have a serious impact on yoeld. But those sensors can often be calibrated just with a simple coefficient.
I wonder if the internal heating of the chip would affect the reading.
My related experience was positioning a temperature sensor above a Raspberry Pi Zero and the couple watts produced by the Pi was enough to affect the measurement.
Because the people using the old solution aren't the ones buying it. A chem lab is going to be stocked with the equipment everyone used in chem school, and the people who went to chem school are going to require that equipment. Yes, it'd trivial to change processes to use this new solution, but every chem lab in existence already has a thermometer and a hot plate with stirring, so the expense makes very little sens on its own.
AD: Yes, what a wonderful application of tech. I very much enjoy seeing these hardware <> software open source projects. Congratulations on developing a finished project.
I formed a company and got $50k in grant money from the state of Wisconsin along with incubator space and advisors. I did all the initial software and hardware development, the first one I built took components from a battery powered toothbrush to inductively charge so I didn’t need a charging port exposed to solutions.
I loved working on this project, I had the idea after having frustrating experiences working with 30 year old lab equipment that took up more bench space in the lab than my backpack did. At the end of the day that’s all it was. I had no idea wtf I was doing and the company eventually folded as real life became too much to juggle with my project. I figured I could use the same form factor to build tons of different sensors based on the many different ion selective electrodes already on the market. Eventually I needed to try and manufacture these sensors myself in a form factor that would fit inside flasks in the lab.
Letting this project fall by the wayside is probably the single greatest regret of my life. I often think back about how different things could’ve turned out if only I had made the correct decisions and executed properly and actually found someone to license my patent… so it goes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RrBhliK1ryY&pp=ygUbUGhpbmRpbmc...