Hi,
my name's John. I'm trying to set up an arduino project where I try to detect small pieces of metal with laser sensors. Do you have any suggestions as to what products I should purchase to do this? I have not used arduino before and am quite confused about the terminology for all the projects. So far there are 2 things I've purchased, you can find them at these links:
Thanks,
John
detect small pieces of metal with laser sensors.
What do you mean by this?
Do you expect the pieces of metal block the beam? If so, look up "Arduino photogate", "laser tripwire" or similar.
Hint: avoid Instructables, most of them offer very bad advice.
No basically what I'm going to make is small blocks of metals filled with certain chemicals. I'm going to determine if I can use a laser sensor to pick up on the chemical; basically as a chemical sensor. What I need is an arduino board that can connect to a laser transmitter and reciever; just having difficulty finding something inexpensive that does just this.
"pick up on the chemical"
Do you want the laser to do something with chemical? Vaporize it or something?
I may want to use an x-ray sensor as well. That will probably work better.
The laser probably won't vaporize it but I want to see what the reflected laser might look like if I receive it. if I can collect some data on that I could make a small chemical sensor.
Actually lets just say its a chemical sensor for now. Sorry about that.
To noninvasively detect chemicals with light, you need to collect an absorbance and/or a fluorescence emission spectrum. The detectors in either case are expensive and need to operate in an environment with as little extraneous light as possible.
In both cases you must know what to expect in the way of both chemicals and possible contaminants. There are no guarantees of positive or negative identification in either case.
Research the methodology before you worry about how to hook it up to an Arduino!
Hi,
This is probably what you are thinking of.
http://www.oxford-instruments.com/products/analysers/handheld-analysers/libs-analyzer-mpulse-series
Tom.... 
"I try to detect small pieces of metal with laser sensors" & "use a laser sensor to pick up on the chemical" ?? Sounds very disjointed to me.
Anyway this type of thing is not done with metal vessels, it's done with glass, or ZnSe, or some other material.
Unless, of course the object of the exercise is to determine something about the destruction of the vessels.....