Congratulations on your assembly. However, the photos above suggest a misunderstanding about using the device. Remember, there is a 'slit' through which the light source must pass and that slit is a simple replacement for optics which would collimate the light ( all light in parallel lines ). You have the light source so close, that 1) the slit will not be able to provide semi-collimated light, 2) it will over-load the camera producing 'clipping' in the RGB channels from the camera and 3) it will easily illuminate the interior of the fold-up assembly you constructed and produce reflections which will cause unwanted 'signals'. Think of the light source you want to measure as needing to act like a distant star -- so all the rays which travel from it, through the slit and on to the diffraction grating and the camera -- will be parallel. Hope this helps.

Cheers, Dave

Thank you Dave!!! Based on your earlier advice that you left on my spectrum, i added non-reflective paper around the back of my phone's camera to reduce reflection. Thank you very much.

I am still dealing with the difference between the spectrum shown on the preview screen (which looks good) to the clipped spectrum i see once capturing.

Great; the paper should help. Now move the lamp about 4 ft away.... the bands should no longer look saturated.

A couple other thoughts. I've not used the phone app, but I wonder if the software is detecting some reflections and so being fooled. Another thought is perhaps the rotate function visually works, but there's a bug in software that does not handle the rotation correctly. Granted those are not user-available.

Just ordered the kit .... should be interesting to check its performance.

Is there a bug in the software that does not handle rotation correctly? Did / could you report it on github? https://github.com/jywarren/spectral-workbench/issues

I see what you mean about the oversaturated bands. Got it! Much better now. Last night I had good luck having folks add paper to the back of their phone around the lens to block reflections. As for myself, I'm still facing issues with the spectrum shown on the preview screen (which looks good) versus the clipped spectrum that gets captured.