This week in the Public Lab community newsletter, check out holiday specials on kits, read about water-based mapping work being done and catch up on the smartphone "backpack" spectrometer project. Enjoy!

Announcements

Hack your holidays with Public Lab! During the holiday season, enjoy $5 Public Lab intro kits that you can try out with some of the winter ideas suggested by the community. If you're not sure what the DIY science enthusiast in your life wants this holiday season, one of the new Public Lab gift cards might be a perfect choice!

Catch up on the progress that has been made with the smartphone spectrometer in a Kickstarter update posted yesterday. You can now pre-order yours, ready to ship before the holidays.

Pre-orders are also now available for the Infragram webcam, shipping in January.

A new wiki page showing how to post a Public Lab event was added.

New and ongoing projects

People have been taking to the water to map with poles, kites and balloons in Louisiana, New York and Massachusetts.

Aerial mapping workshops and classes have been happening in Portland, Philadelphia and New York City.

Support for Firefox and Firefox for Android was added to Spectral Workbench

A two-year-old bug in MapKnitter was fixed, allowing for map stitching at very high zoom levels, great for pole photography!

Research Note highlights

1. The BRIT camera rig (posted by jbest)
2. Visualight board for Thermal Flashlight (posted by warren)
3. Testing SpectralWorkbench webcam recognition (posted by briandegger)
4. Red filter rising (posted by cfastie)

If anything was missed, please post a research note or email the lists. Have a great week everyone! Shannon

P.S. Remember -- you can subscribe to this newsletter or follow via RSS.