Page used to track and document work on portable spectrometer with light source development. Reference research note http://publiclab.org/notes/silverhammer/03-20-2014/test-rig-for-portable-spectrometer as the starting point for this work.

Experiment 1 (started on 4/6/2014)

Purpose: To integrate light sources into a system that mounts onto a tablet or phone, the pathlength (distance between the camera and the light source) needs to be reduced so the camera can focus. One possible way of doing this is to swap out the lense of the camera, but this is impractical.

Another approach is to cheat by changing the optics externally. This can be done by placing a magnifying lens over the camera viewport. This can enable the camera to get focus on objects much closer to it than what is typical (which for my equipment is ~9 inches). I supported this project on kickstarter (and it actually delivered & works!) a lens that fits nicely over the camera on my Android tablet. Details on the lens can be found here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-lens-cell-phone-based-microscope

What I want to do is put this lens into the system that I'm currently using and see if I can reduce the pathlength.

Procedure: TBD Results: TBD Conclusion: TBD