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DIY mass spectrometer measures potassium in dietary salt substitute

Applied Science

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2023.
  • Presented by Ben Krasnow, creator of Applied Science

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

452K views6 years ago3 recommendations

HardwareElectronicsEmbedded systems

Ben Krasnow demonstrates how to build and operate a simple mass spectrometer to measure potassium isotopes in a salt substitute.

How to build and operate a simple mass spectrometer. Please ask questions in the comments, as always. (I had to re-upload this video to fix the ending --I'm very sorry if your early comments were lost!) Scientific American article: scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scientist-1970-07… $7.99 is a good value for the entire back issue in plain PDF format, and an example of a publisher being reasonable. I'm happy to support this. Original Dewdney paper: sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1969211 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_potassium en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization_energy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_ionization en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroradius patreon.com/AppliedScience

Why it's here

3 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Highly recommended for its detailed, practical explanation of building complex scientific instruments from scratch.

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You'd be interested in Ben Krasnow's DiY attempt. It's still understandable but he tries to explain why it's built the way it is and give you a good basis of the theory of operation. link to this video

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You might like - link to this video ( DIY mass spectrometer measures potassium in dietary salt substitute ) by Ben Krasnow

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The channels that I had in mind when I wrote that are channels by experts in their fields, which somehow often happen to be low production value - because you know real scientists are about substance, not style :-) So here's a random one in that category: this guy decided to try and build a mass spectrometer from scratch link to this video

CamperBob2on Hacker News • Disputes

On “OpenRAMAN – Low-cost, high-performance, open-source Raman spectrometer”

Ben Krasnow took some steps in that direction: link to this video As with his Raman setup, there were some good questions raised in the comments about whether he really saw the effect in question or just got lucky with plausible-appearing artifacts. It's hard to assess validity from the presented results alone, which is unfortunately common in Ben's videos. In the Raman video, he didn't test anything but a single styrofoam cup, and in the mass-spec video he didn't do the obvious baseline run with a clean filament. Ben's channel is one of those rare ones where the comments are worth reading. You can really see how easy it is for a scientist to inadvertently fool themselves and others. I often end up yel…