Scientists Send Text Message Using Vodka | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Send Text Message Using Vodka

voanews.com

29 pointsdylandrop15 comments

A rather linkbaity headline; I send text messages using vodka pretty often, and then I have to check to see what exactly I said in the morning.

Interesting, though. Seems like a series of breezes could seriously impact the communication, though, making the whole robots-in-the-sewer system not work quite so well.

MITM issues are far more uhh... interesting ... as well.

"Bob sends Alice his scent. Mallory intercepts the smell, pretending to be Alice to Bob and Bob to Alice."

Ahem.

Other submissions of this story, although none have any discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6945800 (theverge.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948140 (extremetech.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943036 (laptopmag.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942179 (sciencedaily.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6939145 (plosone.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6939133 (scienceagogo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935903 (arstechnica.com)

The actual study, which you have buried in that list of links, is actually quite nice.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

They achieved about .3 bits per second.

Components needed to replicate:

* DuroBlast Electronic Spray

* Arduino: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11021

Alcohol Sensors:

* MQ-303a : http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/alcohol-sensor-mq303a-p-549...

* MQ-3 : https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8880

* MR513 : http://www.cooking-hacks.com/mr513-alcohol-high-accuracy

So their setup is probably about $100

I would be more interested if they sent vodka using text message

Text messages are only the relatively boring first step in this kind of project. If these guys go on to implement IP/Vodka they can proudly follow in the footsteps of such hacks as RFC 1149 :-) "The network smells a little slow today"

Pretty neat that I know the people in this article personally.

Sounds like they're shooting for an Ig Nobel prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

So what's the baud rate?

I might guess something like one bit, every 10 seconds?

Given huge number of possible molecules and the relatively slow nature of wafting them around the room, I suspect they plan to pack a lot more that 1 bit of information in each molecule!

I think it's worth exploring non-standard means of establishing networks no matter how ostensibly silly as they can come in extremely useful when e.g. governments try to restrict internet access in oppressive countries or natural disasters occur, etc.

Though I'm not sure if this particular example is of much use ;-)

I think the Native Americans did the same thing with smoke. "Smoke" for 1, "no smoke" for zero. And they went way further than across the room.

Sort of, but they didn't smell the smoke signal, just look at it. It's cool that we can automate it too.

Point a camera at the place where the smoke pit would be. Poof! Automation.

As to smell, that was a stupid way to do it.

We can detect levels of lots of different things. Instead of 1 or 0 over time it would have made a lot more sense to say Ok, I need to be able to encode 140 characters with 37 choices (alpha-numeric + Space).

There is a humidity sensor, a Carbon monoxide sensor, an oxygen sensor, and a Carbon dioxide sensor. All are really cheap.

If you a tube and 37 levels that you release water, carbon monoxide, oxygen, and carbon dioxide to. You now have the ability to send. 4 characters at a time. Since alcohol sensors are cheap, we can use that for "parity" so we know that the message was sent correctly.

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