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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Huh this is interesting. For those who might know... do we have odor sensors? Is that even possible to have? I guess it would need to be a chemical sensor that detects the chemicals in the odor right?

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Prof. Lewis at Caltech has been working on this since at least the late 1990s, when I first learned about it as an undergraduate, and probably earlier:

http://nsl.caltech.edu/research:nose

I guess that would be a system like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mas... ?

Right, I guess I should have made my question more concise...are there electronic odor sensors? i.e. stuff small enough that can be e.g. put inside my cellphone.

As far as I am aware, the smallest available odor sensor is a trained bee or wasp. The hymenopterans are classically conditioned to extend their tongues when exposed to a particular chemical or odor profile. Then they are restrained inside a plastic cartridge, such that whenever they extend their tongues, a tiny button is pressed.

The cartridge is then loaded into a handheld device that lights an LED whenever the insect detects the odor.

Much cheaper than trained dogs, and the purely electronic detectors are not quite as robust [yet]. The downside is that you can't exactly buy it once and keep using it for the next 10 years.

Sniffer insects have been used to detect bombs, fungal blight, cancer, diabetes, pregnancy, contraband drugs, and uranium.

I thought this was all a joke, but apparently only some of it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera_training

The cartridges are not mentioned in that article. I saw them on a television program. They so strongly resembled rows of schoolchildren sitting at their desks, that I half expected a bell to ring before the bees put their textbooks away and go on to learn another scent.

The commercial product is the VASOR136 by Inscentinel Ltd.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.269373!/file/Sniff...

Pretty small, but not cell-phone sized. https://www.amazon.com/MicrOptix-VSA-100-Analyzing-Spectroph...

Ones that detect particular contaminants can be a lot smaller, especially if they are single-use.

That's a spectrophotometer, not a GC/MS... Can you detect smelly airborne chemicals with this as well?

Reading the description, it might be for liquids instead. Anyway it won't give as much information about the molecular components as a mass spectrometer, but you can still get a good idea if there are contaminants.

Possibly.

Here is an article from MIT in 2014 detailing recent discoveries and improvements in chip tech that could allow this: http://news.mit.edu/2014/wireless-chemical-sensor-for-smartp...

Sort of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose

Check out the example section in particular for something that doesn't look as huge as GC/MS setups.

I don't think they're quite small enough to be pocketable, but some cities do sweeps with specialized on-car air quality equipment to find natural gas leaks (Boston leaks like a sieve, for example - https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots/bosto...)

I've heard of development on drug detection "vaccumes" / machines, so it's probably possible. Kind of a scary idea tbh.

Edit: Apparently they are already in use at prisons. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-10-02/news/1997275114_...

you should check out www.maskau.dk/projects/electronic-nose -- he's doing amazing stuff with $2 sensors (and we're working with him to try to smell fruit growing on trees)

While I was out trying to find the possible applications for Sunon's adorable 9mm blowers[1], I came across Cairpol's Cairsens devices[2]. I'm not sure what the technology they're using is, but they're claiming to measure about ten different classes of air pollutants out of a cylinder that looks about the size of a D-Cell battery.

[1] http://www.sunon.com/publication_page.php?pkid=3 [2] http://cairpol.com/en/home/

Do you mean like Smellmaster 9000 from Richie Rich (1994) movie?

https://assets3.thrillist.com/v1/image/1378286/size/tl-horiz...

This movie had ever lasting impression on me and I have always wondered if we could have such device =)

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