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SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All!


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Who wants one?
SCiO: Explore More!
A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All!

Scan materials or physical objects. Get instant relevant information to your smartphone. Food, medicine, and more.

Smartphones made it easy to research facts, capture images, and navigate street maps, but they haven't brought us closer to the physical environment in which we live – until now.

Meet SCiO. It is the world's first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of materials around you, sent directly to your smartphone. Read More

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Gotta love advertising, absolutely no concern for truth and accuracy, just tell the people what they want to hear, take there money and run

Its not a worlds first either, about 6 months ago we had a similar thread, discussing if a similar product would be useful

http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41721

Edit

After having a quick look they seem to be the same, my bad

here is a different one tho https://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometer

Edited by Change
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I wonder what it would think about the bio-electronic plant we were discussing on here a couple of days ago.

cool but.

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  • 4 months later...

Meet SCiO. It is the world's first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of materials around you, sent directly to your smartphone. Read More

Am road testing one right now and I'm not impressed. Tho admittedly I still have to run some samples.

It's not as simple to use as the hype suggests- far from it.

First point is the 29 page manual. First hint that things are about to get complex

Second- the documentation is pretty good- but a long way from perfect. SCIO isn't just the unit, it's the interface you set up between your SCIO unit, your web browser and the sampling package. You need to define that relationship.

Thirdly there's a lot of things which aren't said- or are hidden away from the shiny main pages. Like the fact that the unit doesn't handle liquid testing right now ( tho they are allegedly going to fix that soon ), probably isn't going to be useful for testing medicinal cannabis at all ( spectral range is 700-1100nm ) and it doesn't work reliably to detect compounds

I'm not familiar with NIR spectrometry, but I've a bit of experience running a UV-VIS standard spectro, and still the learning curve is way beyond what was implied in the PR ( FWIW I didn't buy the unit, I'm road testing it for someone ).

Fourth point is the need to be constantly connected online. Not good for field analysis.

Fifth is that the online forums aren't as well populated as you'd think, given the advertising and excitement around it's release. Which is a tell all of it's own- not as many people seem to be engaging with it beyond product purchase- and there's the rub. It will take a lot of crowd work to finally determine a reliable best-use application for it.

I reckon it will be something most purchasers find too complicated and stick in a drawer.

Running samples tonight and tomorrow, will update to see how it pans out

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