Child engineer creates a hat that measures just how smelly your bodily gases are

Think it's rough being a 12-year-old-boy? Imagine being a 12-year-old electronics engineer, inventor, designer, and CEO of your own company.

Quin Etnyre looks like a regular kid, but he's also an engineering expert. (Image via Qtechknow)

Quin Etnyre is an ordinary 12-year-old, except for the fact that he took an interest in electronics projects when he was just 11. After taking Arduino classes, where he learned how to use the single-board microcontroller and its software and participating in fairs, he started his own company, Qtechknow, based on the central coast of California. Qtechknow sells kits, ArduSensors, and other printed-circuit boards. On his site, Etnyre provides tutorials for all kinds of DIY projects.

One DIY project he did early on was the “Gas Cap,” which actually detects and grades someone’s bodily gases in terms of intensity. (You can understand how flatulence would strike an interest in a young boy’s mind.)

The Gas Cap. (Image via Qtechknow)

The 12-year-old discovered that you could use a methane sensor (he prefers the MQ-4 methane sensor). Then he combined the sensor with a hat equipped with an LED Bar Graph and XBee.

In his Instructables tutorial, Etnyre explains step by step how you can build your own Gas Cap, a human-gas-operated LED Bar Graph attached to a hat. When you fart into the methane sensor, it wirelessly transmits that data to the hat so the LEDs will light up and you can determine just how bad that episode was. The project will cost you about $100, but how many people can say they have a hat that monitors their gas-passing abilities.

In a comment on his Instructables page, Etnyre mentions kicking it up a notch by creating an “ultimate fart evaluation kit that evaluates an H₂ S sensor, a methane sensor, and a microphone to detect the real value of the fart.”

Etnyre teaches Arduino classes for his friends with these ArduSensor Fun Packs. (Image via Qtechknow)
 
Follow his instructions and create your own gas-measuring sensor.

Learn more about Quin Etnyre here.