All Over But the Funding: Open Hardware Spectrometer Kit

New submitter mybluevan writes "The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science is putting together an open hardware spectrometer kit on Kickstarter. The kits are built using an HD webcam, discarded DVD, and a couple other odd bits. They've also put together a kit for your smart phone and open-source software for desktop, Android, and iOS. Need to analyze the contents of your coffee, the output of your new grow lights, or a distant star on a budget? Just build your own spectrometer, or pick up the limited edition steampunk version." Besides making cool hardware, they'd like to "build a Wikipedia-style library of open source spectra, and to refine and improve sample collection and analysis techniques. We imagine a kind of 'SHAZAM for materials' which can help to investigate chemical spills, diagnose crop diseases, identify contaminants in household products, and even analyze olive oil, coffee, and homebrew beer."

Comments

Pretty cool ...

[RockDoctor]

That's an interesting combination of technologies and materials. The basic idea should be workable, but how workable they'd be for material identification given the prevalences of IR filters on (consumer grade) CCD sensors and their relatively low sensitivity ....Identifying spectral lines on a 10-bit sensor is difficult enough. Trying to do it on the 7-8 bits that you get from a (consumer grade) sensor ... is going to be more difficult.

But ... that's an interesting idea. I think that's worth a six-pack worth of funding.

Did I get a first post? Are the trolls and the GNAA spammers asleep? Or, preferably, dieing slowly?