Public Lab Research note

Testing if light leaks through the walls of the PL Spectrometer v3

by warren | July 13, 2015 20:55 13 Jul 20:55 | #12056 | #12056

Following up on a note on possible light going through the black cardstock walls of the v3 spectrometer by @lukebrown

Luke said it mostly happened in bright sunlight, but also indoors. I just did a test in (admittedly cloudy) sunlight vs. closing the blinds, and covering the device with a thick blanket, and didn't see a big difference. It doesn't seem likely to me that light is leaking in through this big dark folded-over blanket. How does this compare to your noise, @lukebrown? Is it possible you have a small light leak as opposed to it going through the paper itself? I'm just trying to reproduce the issue first.

This has had 10 pixel rows of data smoothed to try to reduce noise:

https://spectralworkbench.org/sets/2445

2 Comments

  
lukebrown commented over 9 years ago

@warren Hmm, well I've just been outside to repeat the experiment (overcast, cloudy conditions today) and light is definitely being transmitted through the lid of my enclosure! Hopefully these webcam images will help illustrate:

nofingers.png

No sleeve

fingers.png

No sleeve with shadow of fingers on lid visible

sleeve.png

Sleeve

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Comment Author Profile Picture warren commented over 9 years ago

Thanks for your excellent empirical work and suggestion. I've left a comment on your older note, and this is very helpful.

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