4 ms·

I wonder what kind of experiments/projects you will do with given instrument. My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, bu

by dejv 8y ago

I wonder what kind of experiments/projects you will do with given instrument. My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, but it was very hard to actually find some viable market. You can actually find modules[0] that will give you quite a good performance for given price. Electronics needed to run those devices are quite complex, but I even seen some open hardware boards available that might be half decent. Still, you are going to be in territory of 500 USD even in fully DIY build. [0] https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/photometry-systems/mini-spectrometer/micro-spectrometer/index.html https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/photometry-systems/m...

lightedman 8y ago
"My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, but it was very hard to actually find some viable market." You'd have done well with the mining market if you had your resolution down to 5nm precision. 15nm is just a bit too much of a drift range to allow for reasonably accurate mineral identification.
- joshvm 8y ago
  Interesting - the system we sell is better than 5nm (depending on the fibre) and is in that price bracket. What's the application in mining?
  - lightedman 8y ago
    Soil sample analysis so you can see if there's specific ores present. Specifically, direct on-site, without the need to go transporting to a lab. IR spectometry is a wonderful thing, look up ASTER and LANDSAT 7/8.
burfog 8y ago
I'd teach AP Chemistry. It's useful for teaching AP Biology too. The equipment, with some application-specific packaging and instructions, might also work for: aquarium keepers, gardeners, pool owners, beer brewers, people on well water. Full DIY builds are cheap for a colorimeter, photometer, and turbidimeter. One can make all three for about $30, not counting labor and a computer. The trouble is manufacturing volume. Sadly, not every student takes AP Chemistry. I realize that the manufacturing processes with low per-unit cost (casting, forging, blow molding, extrusion...) all have high set-up costs. This really is my complaint: if people cared about learning science as much as they cared about pointless toys, the production volume would let us have these things at prices ranging from a few dollars (simple colorimeter) to a hundred dollars (stuff with decent lenses and moving parts). The affordability of low-end cell phones makes it clear how low prices could go. I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. FYI, there are about 320000 people learning AP Chemistry, of which about 9600 are homeschooled and thus unlikely to reuse equipment from prior years. Assuming the equipment in schools needs replacement every 20 years, perhaps 25000 could be sold per year if the price were low enough to not be a budget problem. I'm thinking you'd have to knock about 90% off the price, and I suspect that 25000 per year is nowhere near the volume you'd need to justify the set-up costs of high-volume manufacturing processes. I may be wrong though... maybe you can get a good deal on plastic molds or custom aluminum extrusion dies or molds for some sort of casting process.
- joshvm 8y ago
  >I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. Yup, being a hardware engineer makes you appreciate just how cheap some things are. Bear in mind that our motivation to develop our instrument was shock at how much the incumbents were charging! I think getting to O($500) for a quality instrument without high volume would be fairly doable with some clever design work. Getting to O($100) yes, if you could make the entire optical bench as a MEMS product and you have scale on your side (this has been done partially by SCiO). A big limiting factor is that there aren't many perceived use-cases beyond "science". The big consumer one that everyone touts is food inspection, but outside a few very specific uses, it's a gimmick to most people. Maybe for avocado ripeness... It's also not ready for primetime yet. The real markets are places like astronomy where people don't hesitate spending thousands on glass and silicon. Brewing is another. You want hobbies which are taken up by data nerds. The other problem is that spectrometers are overkill for a lot of stuff. Colour measurement for instance - (calibrated) colorimiter ICs are incredibly cheap. For applications where you need the resolution you either need an experienced user or software to automatically interpret the results. There are some other off the shelf solutions: Hamamatsu make a low resolution spectrometer that's good enough for general demonstration - costs a few hundred[1]. AMS make an 18-channel "spectral" sensor which costs $10 (ish?). There have been a few Kickstarters which are trying to address this e.g. the SCiO [2]. That's about the closest we've got so far to a mass market spectrometer and it costs $299. The problem as you say is: how many schools can afford even $100 on a device which may only get used once or twice a year? Holding a transmission grating up to your eye will solve maybe 90% of the needs of most teachers. It's enough to show different line emission from a bunch of lamps. The public labs spectrometer would do for the other %10. [1]https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ [2]https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/products/c12880ma-micro-spectrometer https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/prod...
  - burfog 8y ago
    I don't think MEMS is required. For $60 you can get a 2 TB hard drive. It contains platters that are several inches in diameter, and there is a swinging arm that is a couple inches long. All these parts move with incredibly tight tolerances. DVD writers are $26, and Blu-Ray writers are $120. Those are an even better comparison, with moving optics. Food inspection is silly unless that is your job. People who keep aquariums, particularly saltwater ones, are a more likely market. 18 channels sounds great for most school labs. It's enough for a crude graph of chlorophyll's absorption and/or florescence. It might even be enough to distinctly identify the four main sources of color in spinach leaves. Repeated sampling at about 10 Hz would be plenty for all the labs involving reaction rates; most could be done with 0.1 Hz. For example, a popular lab involves measuring the changing rate at which Crystal Violet is destroyed by lye. Some less-demanding popular labs involve measuring the amount of copper in brass (as copper nitrate via nitric acid) or the molarity of blue food coloring in drinks.

by dejv 8y ago

lightedman 8y ago

"My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, but it was very hard to actually find some viable market." You'd have done well with the mining market if you had your resolution down to 5nm precision. 15nm is just a bit too much of a drift range to allow for reasonably accurate mineral identification.

joshvm 8y ago
Interesting - the system we sell is better than 5nm (depending on the fibre) and is in that price bracket. What's the application in mining?
- lightedman 8y ago
  Soil sample analysis so you can see if there's specific ores present. Specifically, direct on-site, without the need to go transporting to a lab. IR spectometry is a wonderful thing, look up ASTER and LANDSAT 7/8.

burfog 8y ago

I'd teach AP Chemistry. It's useful for teaching AP Biology too. The equipment, with some application-specific packaging and instructions, might also work for: aquarium keepers, gardeners, pool owners, beer brewers, people on well water. Full DIY builds are cheap for a colorimeter, photometer, and turbidimeter. One can make all three for about $30, not counting labor and a computer. The trouble is manufacturing volume. Sadly, not every student takes AP Chemistry. I realize that the manufacturing processes with low per-unit cost (casting, forging, blow molding, extrusion...) all have high set-up costs. This really is my complaint: if people cared about learning science as much as they cared about pointless toys, the production volume would let us have these things at prices ranging from a few dollars (simple colorimeter) to a hundred dollars (stuff with decent lenses and moving parts). The affordability of low-end cell phones makes it clear how low prices could go. I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. FYI, there are about 320000 people learning AP Chemistry, of which about 9600 are homeschooled and thus unlikely to reuse equipment from prior years. Assuming the equipment in schools needs replacement every 20 years, perhaps 25000 could be sold per year if the price were low enough to not be a budget problem. I'm thinking you'd have to knock about 90% off the price, and I suspect that 25000 per year is nowhere near the volume you'd need to justify the set-up costs of high-volume manufacturing processes. I may be wrong though... maybe you can get a good deal on plastic molds or custom aluminum extrusion dies or molds for some sort of casting process.

joshvm 8y ago
>I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. Yup, being a hardware engineer makes you appreciate just how cheap some things are. Bear in mind that our motivation to develop our instrument was shock at how much the incumbents were charging! I think getting to O($500) for a quality instrument without high volume would be fairly doable with some clever design work. Getting to O($100) yes, if you could make the entire optical bench as a MEMS product and you have scale on your side (this has been done partially by SCiO). A big limiting factor is that there aren't many perceived use-cases beyond "science". The big consumer one that everyone touts is food inspection, but outside a few very specific uses, it's a gimmick to most people. Maybe for avocado ripeness... It's also not ready for primetime yet. The real markets are places like astronomy where people don't hesitate spending thousands on glass and silicon. Brewing is another. You want hobbies which are taken up by data nerds. The other problem is that spectrometers are overkill for a lot of stuff. Colour measurement for instance - (calibrated) colorimiter ICs are incredibly cheap. For applications where you need the resolution you either need an experienced user or software to automatically interpret the results. There are some other off the shelf solutions: Hamamatsu make a low resolution spectrometer that's good enough for general demonstration - costs a few hundred[1]. AMS make an 18-channel "spectral" sensor which costs $10 (ish?). There have been a few Kickstarters which are trying to address this e.g. the SCiO [2]. That's about the closest we've got so far to a mass market spectrometer and it costs $299. The problem as you say is: how many schools can afford even $100 on a device which may only get used once or twice a year? Holding a transmission grating up to your eye will solve maybe 90% of the needs of most teachers. It's enough to show different line emission from a bunch of lamps. The public labs spectrometer would do for the other %10. [1]https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ [2]https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/products/c12880ma-micro-spectrometer https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/prod...
- burfog 8y ago
  I don't think MEMS is required. For $60 you can get a 2 TB hard drive. It contains platters that are several inches in diameter, and there is a swinging arm that is a couple inches long. All these parts move with incredibly tight tolerances. DVD writers are $26, and Blu-Ray writers are $120. Those are an even better comparison, with moving optics. Food inspection is silly unless that is your job. People who keep aquariums, particularly saltwater ones, are a more likely market. 18 channels sounds great for most school labs. It's enough for a crude graph of chlorophyll's absorption and/or florescence. It might even be enough to distinctly identify the four main sources of color in spinach leaves. Repeated sampling at about 10 Hz would be plenty for all the labs involving reaction rates; most could be done with 0.1 Hz. For example, a popular lab involves measuring the changing rate at which Crystal Violet is destroyed by lye. Some less-demanding popular labs involve measuring the amount of copper in brass (as copper nitrate via nitric acid) or the molarity of blue food coloring in drinks.