6 ms·

A few problems with scio: - It's reading from (mostly) the surface, not the bulk mass. Not great for heterogeneous things like pills - It uses machine learnin

A few problems with scio: - It's reading from (mostly) the surface, not the bulk mass. Not great for heterogeneous things like pills - It uses machine learning models on 10-datapoint IR reflectance spectra, meaning it's only useful in a trained regime. It doesn't give information about composition, but instead classifies a sample as a member of a pretty constrained population. So a mystery substance that can't be roughly identified ('vegetable', 'pill' etc) can't be scanned, etc. If nobody's built a model for the thing you're scanning and for the property you want to evaluate, then you're out of luck - So, evaluating drugs ("we can distinguish fake from real viagra") is done by looking at the surface coating which typically has no active ingredients (and even if there were, the signal would be washed out by inactive ingredients). The model is basically trained on 10-100 scans of a presumed good viagra pill, or maybe 10-100 different good viagra pills if they felt like it - Building models requires purchase of a $250 license in addition to the $250 hardware, which is just ridiculous. Of course they're doing the calculations on their servers, but it still seems really scammy, hostile to developers, and counterproductive to launching an ecosystem of scanning models. The useless 10-point IR "spectra" notwithstanding, I would totally buy one of these if you could use open data and open models supported by a public community.

dancsi 10y ago
As for the last point, you are right, they are purposefully sending encrypted/encoded(?) data to your phone, which is then sent to their server. The raw spectrum will only be returned from the server if you have an even more expensive "researcher" account...
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  One might assume their business model involves collecting lots of data + using it to build their own in-house models for sale to corporations, or just selling it raw?
trendia 10y ago
So, if the drug has a time-release coating (which many do) it's probably not going to work.
bambax 10y ago
All that you say is true (I think) and yet some applications are amazing (I backed the SCiO on Kickstarter). Namely, it can tell your body fat from a scan of your skin, and the results seem pretty accurate (same result as a Withings scale for example).
- jasonlaramburu 10y ago
  I backed it as well. I've found the body fat analyzer applet to be highly inaccurate and variable compared to other methods (resistive, calipers etc).
jasonlaramburu 10y ago
I got a scio dev kit from kickstarter. I backed it because they claimed at launch you would be able scan the leaf of a living plant and determine if it was sufficiently watered. Unfortunately this functionality, along with many other promised applets, was never built and the dev forums are prettmuch dead. When I looked into building my own model, I found the time required is pretty huge. To build a remotely useful model, one would need to scan between 200 and 300 samples. That means 200-300 individually potted plants for every plant variety you want to measure!!!
- rosser 10y ago
  I also bought one during the crowdfunding campaign, and am pretty deeply disappointed at the difference between advertised and actual capabilities.
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  Yeah I was really excited about working with it, limitations notwithstanding... Until learning they charged $$$ for a dev license, which seems like a slap in the face and a hallmark of scams. Now I'm just waiting for used units to hit eBay + reverse engineer the protocol. I'm not quite interested enough yet to buy bare Hamamatsu (or neospectra/other knockoff?) spectrometer chips, but would totally buy a breakout PCB for one if somebody had a bunch made
  - joshvm 10y ago
    About $200 for a hamamatsu breakout: https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/products/c12666ma-micro-spectrometer https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/prod... They've just finished a round, but they're reasonably regular.
    - hgchoi 10y ago
      Also, ~$150 for a nanolambda nsp32 spectrum sensor https://www.nanolambda.net https://www.nanolambda.net
cr0sh 10y ago
Regarding your last point - check out this youtube vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfiqdooNBb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfiqdooNBb8 Cheap diffraction grating and a cheap camera; basically, the idea would be to somehow use an IR sensitive camera (most are - at least in the far-mid range), an IR source (maybe an unfocused IR laser diode?), and a diffraction grating. Ideally for the grating you'd use one for IR - but I haven't found one that wasn't reflective-based (instead of transmissive) - there's probably a good reason (likely having to do with cheap materials and IR absorption - which is why lenses and mirrors for laser cutters tend to be pretty pricey). Anyhow - thems the basics. Take that, get an image from the camera, run a fourier transform on the data, get the peaks, then pass it thru a trained CNN (?) - heck, you might be able to forgo the transform part and just use the data from the camera directly (repurpose imagenet or something). Yeah - I think this whole thing could be made an open-source project; probably even an instructable...? At the very least, it could become an interesting science fair project for some enterprising kid...
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  CNN will convolve already so fft should be unnecessary.
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    I realized that as I noted in the second half of the sentence...
- joshumax 10y ago
  > At the very least, it could become an interesting science fair project for some enterprising kid As that "enterprising kid" who couldn't wait until the SCiO was completed, and who was fed up with his 3d printed visible light spectroscope, I put in a lot of research effort figuring out how to go about creating a portable, financially attainable NIR spectroscope. I started out thinking it would be fairly straightforward since I already worked on creating CCD sensor driver boards in my early highschool years (after all it just seemed like you'd need a linear CCD with no IR-cut filter, a diffraction grating, a prism with 95%+ reflectivity, and an IR emitter with a peak wavelength of ~920nm). I invested about 6 months working through the various roadblocks I encountered until I managed to get half-decent results from it when taking the spectrum of various salts. Still never managed to fully refine it since I didn't have the budget to (Heck the Eagle schematics I sent off to a PCB fabricator were so poorly-designed that in order to get it to work correctly it required me to solder a wire across two traces to prevent the sensor from blowing up). It's still somewhere in one of my drawers and is a fun novelty item (and it did win (second?) place at my junior science fair) but at least with my design, it really wasn't the portable tricorder I was hoping for...
nicholas73 10y ago
I have no affiliation with SCiO other than I went to one of their meetups. But to counter your points: - All spectroscopy is surface reading, with NIR penetrating somewhat deeper. But it's still up to you to prepare the sample. - IIRC, there were 400 datapoints corresponding to 1 nm spaced wavelengths from 700-1100 nm. The models aren't super smart, correct, and need a lot of collective data to be useful. They were able to do more than you describe though (a demo they did was scan cheese for protein/fat composition, though to be fair those are trained models, probably with external data). - It's up to you (and the other data providers) to prepare the sample correctly and test it the same way. - Yeah, I don't know what they are thinking on this. Don't get me wrong - I didn't find SCiO particularly useful and am not sure where it's going. But I wouldn't be surprised to see technological improvement either. That is, if they have a business model and further funding.

dancsi 10y ago

As for the last point, you are right, they are purposefully sending encrypted/encoded(?) data to your phone, which is then sent to their server. The raw spectrum will only be returned from the server if you have an even more expensive "researcher" account...

xkcd-sucks 10y ago
One might assume their business model involves collecting lots of data + using it to build their own in-house models for sale to corporations, or just selling it raw?

trendia 10y ago

So, if the drug has a time-release coating (which many do) it's probably not going to work.

bambax 10y ago

All that you say is true (I think) and yet some applications are amazing (I backed the SCiO on Kickstarter). Namely, it can tell your body fat from a scan of your skin, and the results seem pretty accurate (same result as a Withings scale for example).

jasonlaramburu 10y ago
I backed it as well. I've found the body fat analyzer applet to be highly inaccurate and variable compared to other methods (resistive, calipers etc).

jasonlaramburu 10y ago

I got a scio dev kit from kickstarter. I backed it because they claimed at launch you would be able scan the leaf of a living plant and determine if it was sufficiently watered. Unfortunately this functionality, along with many other promised applets, was never built and the dev forums are prettmuch dead. When I looked into building my own model, I found the time required is pretty huge. To build a remotely useful model, one would need to scan between 200 and 300 samples. That means 200-300 individually potted plants for every plant variety you want to measure!!!

rosser 10y ago
I also bought one during the crowdfunding campaign, and am pretty deeply disappointed at the difference between advertised and actual capabilities.
xkcd-sucks 10y ago
Yeah I was really excited about working with it, limitations notwithstanding... Until learning they charged $$$ for a dev license, which seems like a slap in the face and a hallmark of scams. Now I'm just waiting for used units to hit eBay + reverse engineer the protocol. I'm not quite interested enough yet to buy bare Hamamatsu (or neospectra/other knockoff?) spectrometer chips, but would totally buy a breakout PCB for one if somebody had a bunch made
- joshvm 10y ago
  About $200 for a hamamatsu breakout: https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/products/c12666ma-micro-spectrometer https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/prod... They've just finished a round, but they're reasonably regular.
  - hgchoi 10y ago
    Also, ~$150 for a nanolambda nsp32 spectrum sensor https://www.nanolambda.net https://www.nanolambda.net

cr0sh 10y ago

Regarding your last point - check out this youtube vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfiqdooNBb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfiqdooNBb8 Cheap diffraction grating and a cheap camera; basically, the idea would be to somehow use an IR sensitive camera (most are - at least in the far-mid range), an IR source (maybe an unfocused IR laser diode?), and a diffraction grating. Ideally for the grating you'd use one for IR - but I haven't found one that wasn't reflective-based (instead of transmissive) - there's probably a good reason (likely having to do with cheap materials and IR absorption - which is why lenses and mirrors for laser cutters tend to be pretty pricey). Anyhow - thems the basics. Take that, get an image from the camera, run a fourier transform on the data, get the peaks, then pass it thru a trained CNN (?) - heck, you might be able to forgo the transform part and just use the data from the camera directly (repurpose imagenet or something). Yeah - I think this whole thing could be made an open-source project; probably even an instructable...? At the very least, it could become an interesting science fair project for some enterprising kid...

deepnotderp 10y ago
CNN will convolve already so fft should be unnecessary.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  I realized that as I noted in the second half of the sentence...
joshumax 10y ago
> At the very least, it could become an interesting science fair project for some enterprising kid As that "enterprising kid" who couldn't wait until the SCiO was completed, and who was fed up with his 3d printed visible light spectroscope, I put in a lot of research effort figuring out how to go about creating a portable, financially attainable NIR spectroscope. I started out thinking it would be fairly straightforward since I already worked on creating CCD sensor driver boards in my early highschool years (after all it just seemed like you'd need a linear CCD with no IR-cut filter, a diffraction grating, a prism with 95%+ reflectivity, and an IR emitter with a peak wavelength of ~920nm). I invested about 6 months working through the various roadblocks I encountered until I managed to get half-decent results from it when taking the spectrum of various salts. Still never managed to fully refine it since I didn't have the budget to (Heck the Eagle schematics I sent off to a PCB fabricator were so poorly-designed that in order to get it to work correctly it required me to solder a wire across two traces to prevent the sensor from blowing up). It's still somewhere in one of my drawers and is a fun novelty item (and it did win (second?) place at my junior science fair) but at least with my design, it really wasn't the portable tricorder I was hoping for...

nicholas73 10y ago

I have no affiliation with SCiO other than I went to one of their meetups. But to counter your points: - All spectroscopy is surface reading, with NIR penetrating somewhat deeper. But it's still up to you to prepare the sample. - IIRC, there were 400 datapoints corresponding to 1 nm spaced wavelengths from 700-1100 nm. The models aren't super smart, correct, and need a lot of collective data to be useful. They were able to do more than you describe though (a demo they did was scan cheese for protein/fat composition, though to be fair those are trained models, probably with external data). - It's up to you (and the other data providers) to prepare the sample correctly and test it the same way. - Yeah, I don't know what they are thinking on this. Don't get me wrong - I didn't find SCiO particularly useful and am not sure where it's going. But I wouldn't be surprised to see technological improvement either. That is, if they have a business model and further funding.