OK, here's another problem I've been playing with (although it has little to do with IPC mission, it might be related).

I am trying to build a system for measuring airborne particulates for humanitarian organizations looking for inexpensive ways to measure/monitor indoor air quality.  There are cheap sensors available which might do the job, but they would need periodic re-calibration.

So I need a controlled, extremely small amount of smoke.  At first, I thought this would be trivial:  Find a cheap part at DigiKey and put too many watts through it.  Way too much smoke and too little control.  Then I tried burning thin wires.  Too irregular because sometimes they incinerate completely and other times they find a tiny defect and just burn that until the wire stops conducting.  Then I tried just heating the wire enough to burn off the insulation.  Still too irregular!  I did just a few experiments and got 30% variation.

Now I'm starting to think maybe a tiny piece of paper on an automotive cigarette lighter.  That's a lot of power to get that glowing, and it is not convenient to attach to.  Any other ideas?

Wayne

______________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service.
For more information please contact helpdesk at x2960 or [log in to unmask] 
______________________________________________________________________