Construct a spectrometer

Public Lab first began developing cheap spectrometers in the winter of 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then we've made enormous progress and have a variety of designs for less than $100, including:

• a USB webcam based kit (plans)
• a molded plastic smartphone-based kit (plans)
• a very affordable foldable papercraft kit which attaches to a smartphone or webcam (plans)

Of course, the plans for all of these are on the Public Lab website and are open source hardware designs, so you can always make your own -- the kits are intended to help you get started.

However, none of these designs currently includes a place to put a sample, or a laser to illuminate it -- they were designed before we developed that technique. So we are currently working on a new version, and need your help! See the Challenges section for more ways to get involved.

For now, you can purchase the add-on "Alpha" Oil Testing Kit (see parts list to assemble your own) in combination with the existing Desktop Spectrometry Kit, which is what was used in the examples on this page. See the main spectrometer page for build instructions.

A variety of prototypes for scanning fluorescence in oil samples.

http://publiclab.org/notes/mathew/04-07-2015/assembling-the-oil-testing-kit-cuvette-frame