Catch Oil Polluters With Open Source Tools Using the Homebrew Oil Testing Kit

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 25, 2014 @07:39AM from the or-you-could-just-taste-it dept.

First time accepted submitter jywarren writes Ever wish you could investigate pollution yourself? Public Lab's recently announced open source kit aims to make it possible for anyone to become a "pollution detective" by comparing samples of oil contamination. Under the hood, the kit is pretty interesting. It uses the ultraviolet fluorescence caused by a Blu-Ray laser pen in oil samples, and includes a "papercraft" spectrometer to scan and classify oil types. The group's Kickstarter campaign is also seeking 50 early-access beta testers to help test and refine the kit before release.

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Is this a joke? by tacokill · 2014-09-25 08:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

Time to grow up. Homebrew oil testing for big bad oil when you don't even understand the chemistry is a bad idea. This kickstarter looks like it was written up by a 2nd grader.

I bet these guys know a lot more about this than a dinky little kickstarter project. I hope the kickstarter team realizes that they've been identifying, measuring, and studying hydrocarbons for over a century so there's a pretty significant body of work already. Use it.