Hasta La Gadget!

Jun 26

Steorn Snakeoil Salesmen Hawk $400 Magic Wand

lab-hallprobe01

Steorn, you may remember, is the Dublin based company which provided us with a good weeks worth of entertainment back in July 2007. The company’s perpetual motion machine, the Orbo, promised to usher in a new world of clean, free energy. Sadly, before the demonstration could take place, the precision engineered, 25-year life bearings in all three machines mysteriously broke due to “hot lights”.

Now, Steorn is back, and this time it has a real, shipping product. The trouble is that the company so slathered itself in snake-oil two years ago that the stink will likely never wear off. The product is a USB Hall sensor, a conductor which is used to detect fluctuations in magnetic fields. If you have used one of those cheap boxes which detect electric wires behind walls, you’ll know how it works.

The USB Hall Probe comes with Windows software to give you all the readouts and graphs you might want. Is there a catch? Of course there is. The probe costs €290, or around $400. This seems to directly contradict a claim from the company:

Low cost – No need for expensive gaussmeter/teslameter/voltmeter hardware to measure fields.

Now, I took a quick look at the internet and found that an expensive gaussmeter can be had for anywhere from $13 up to over $1000. The pricier options are calibrated and can store data over time, just like the Steorn version, only they are whole boxes, not just a probe.

And there, we think, lies the problem. The Steorn meter is a simple probe and sensor which just measures, and your PC does the processing. These “expensive gaussmeters” do a whole lot more.

Or maybe we’re just cynical based on past events. I’m certainly no Hall Meter expert, but I do come equipped with a pretty good BS detector.

Product page [Steorn]

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