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Air Metal Detectors


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Would love to get your opinions and feedback on this machine coming to market supposedly soon, and supposedly uses a BT connection from your phone or smart device to control the coil. Similar to Deus, but using a phone or iPod touch etc. as the controller. Believe it's single frequency. Here's a video demo. 

 I've long liked the idea of a setup like this but I thought there were good reasons the major players have not created a machine utilizing a phone or iPod touch this way, so I'm skeptical.

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The phone replaces the user interface. the detector is in the coil, just like the Deus.  I think a cell phone would make a lousy interface for metal detecting.  Dirty or wet hands, gloves, hard to see in full sunshine, thermal overload if exposed to full sun for hours in hot climate, flaky Bluetooth mating, the lis could be extended.

Unless all the signal processing is done in the phone, it seems a poor trade-off.

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Hmmmm, that is an interesting concept and maybe in a few years we`ll be wondering why not sooner or as Rick explains maybe the cell phone hasn`t got it. I have found the Deus RC screen is more viewable on the LH wrist, rather then on the top of the swinging shaft, thus an app on the smart phone could be the future. I`ve been using the smart phone with a moving map app for many years and other then the screens limitations in sunlight I believe it walks all over the dedicated GPS.

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I know that one problem is battery life. For an application like this, a phone gets approximately 4 hours. Many people hunt far in excess of that on a given day. Another would seem to me the EMI a phone generates. 

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Yeah, for EMI problems when using my Samsung S6 with the mapping app I set to airplane mode, with the mapping app I set the screen to 1minute on, this allows 8 hours use but that would depend on how often you access the screen. From my use of the S6 (screen on all the time) with my DJI drone 3 hours is max. thus I suspect the screen on draws the battery down quickly.

 

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I believe the concept would work fine where all the processing gets done in the coil itself, and the phone is just a tuning or reporting mechanism. Many Deus owners get everything set up, then put the controller in their pocket. With a properly designed machine you don't need to look at the screen every minute.

This is inevitable and is going to happen. It really is just a matter of who does it "right" before anyone else.

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That does appear to be the setup, with the brains and hard work taking place in the coil, with the phone as a passive info center and remote hub. I kinda caught the developer in a bit of a fudge when he was highlighting the superior processing power of cell phones in a FB post. I pointed out that couldn't be taughted as an advantage over other machines if its set up as he's suggested before and that it would be complete overkill in any case to have a quad or octacore processor running a metal detector. It was my understanding, wherever I got the idea, that a cell phone standing on its own is missing key hardware components or circuits to be able to work alone with a passive coil to complete a metal detecting circuit. 

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  • 8 months later...

Good on them, great concept going into the future.

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Who knows where this will go, in regards to the use of a smart phone to control, perhaps even might go the way of the cheap SDR radio with the right software to exploit the power of the CPU. I`m an excited old fella.

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