I have developed custom Ethylene sensors in the past for customers, and Dynament (UK) is a manufacturer that I can definitely recommend if anyone wants to do this and go down the DIY electronics route without having to dig through a bunch of Chinese products to find the "right one". https://www.dynament.com/products/gas-sensors/standard-non-e...
Cool! I worked at an ethylene-sensing IoT startup (fruit ripeness natch). What was the core sensor you used? (We were using off-the-shelf, but somewhat pricey, electrochemical sensors)
We built that into a custom SS body with a Delrin mounting insert, and ran the serial connections to a custom board that interfaced with up to 8x sensor locations (in conjunction with some other sensor elements). The elements were ~US$200/ea ~4.5 years ago.
These are fancy interpolated IR absorption sensors internally, so any gases of similar concentrations could throw off the readings; depends on the environment. Would be BEST to calibrate to local atmosphere conditions of the installation, but that's not really something you can sell. :P
On the other end of the spectrum (not testing specifications, but just simply "does it network?"), I have successfully ran a 100BASE-TX connection between industrial equipment using individual (not twisted) 24-AWG wires over 20ft.
When I was in high school, I helped my friend get cable TV back to his bedroom by patching it over a really long length of phone cord. Crappy picture, but it was better than nothing, and he didn't have to share the living room TV any longer (his older brother later ran proper coax).
now having flashbacks to dialup tech support in the late 1990s.
Thankfully I've lost the superpower of telling precisely what's wrong with your phone line and where and how many excess devices you've plugged into it just by listening to a connection noise.
I use path tracing for scientific/engineering studies of light propagation; in particular, I attempt to simulate monochromatic light sources and reflective/transmissive/absorptive material configurations (ranging from specular to diffusive, and everything in between) to determine the irradiance delivered to specific geometries. In the past I have used commercial packages like ASAP (APEX Solidworks add-in), Zemax, and FRED (in order of preference).
Displays with relatively simple off-board processing are common, too; you can often run a big display pretty reasonably with a 16MHz Arduino: buydisplay.com
I started reading it, and I thought "this style seems very familiar". When I got to the first schematic, it clicked and I checked the header for the author's name; sure enough, Forrest Mims!
>they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power
Semantics, but I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort. It is a lazy method that circumvents the laws that stand in their way for good reasons.
> I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort
I am inclined to agree with you, but I have no evidence. Hence the questions. HN is well aware of the risks. But I've never seen any work done into the potential benefits. If the benefits are slim, then the discussion is moot. If there are cases that can be solved with phone data only, and if those cases are horrible or frequent enough, then there is a valid debate at hand.
No laws are being circumvented if the police have a warrant. The problem (from a law enforcement perspective) is that technology now makes it easy for people to communicate and store data in a way that the police can’t monitor even with a warrant. This wasn’t an issue when the police could obtain warrants to monitor telephone lines and break into safes.
