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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-sensing-a-disturbance-in-the-putty dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

It is sort of an electronics rule 34 that if something occurs, someone needs to sense it. [Bblorgggg], for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, needs to sense ants moving over trees. No kidding. How are you going to do that? His answer was to use graphene.

Actually, his super sensitive sensors mix graphene in Silly Putty, an unlikely combination that he tried after reading (on Hackaday, no less) about similar experiments at Trinity College resulting in Gputty. The Gputty was highly sensitive to pressure, and so it appears is his DIY version called Goophene. At Trinity they claimed to be able to record the footsteps of a spider, so detecting ant stomping didn't seem too far-fetched. You can see a video of the result, below.

Silly Putty, which is just silicone putty, gives the graphene an unusually large dynamic range. That is, it can detect large pressures (say, a finger pressing) and still detect a very faint pressure (like your heart beating through the finger). Apparently, the graphene lines up to become pretty conductive in the putty and then any deformation causes the resistance to go up. However, when the pressure subsides, the graphene lines back up.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/23/diy-graphene-putty-makes-super-sensitive-sensor/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:00AM (#628105)

    That is so funnay, you are soooo original, just like all the kids who used to make the same lame joke on Chips & Dips, uh, I mean Slash Dot, 20 years ago.