Spectroscopy On The Cheap

[Project 326] wanted to know exactly what gas was in some glass tubes. The answer, of course, is to use a spectrometer, but that’s an expensive piece of gear, right? Not really. Sure, these c…

An Improved Spectrometer, No Lasers Required

Here at Hackaday, we love it when someone picks up the ball from a previous project and runs with it. That’s what we’re all about, really — putting out cool projects that just mig…

Measuring Nanometers At Home

If someone asked you to measure a change in distance at about one ten thousandths of the diameter of a proton, you’d probably assume you would need access a high-tech lab. The job is certainl…

Spectrometer Detects Chemicals By Zapping Samples With A Laser Beam

Here at Hackaday, we love projects that result in useful lab equipment for a fraction of the cost of professional gear. [Lorenz], over at Advanced Tinkering, built his own instrument for Laser-Indu…

Cannonball Mold Makes A Dandy Integrating Sphere For Laser Measurements

It’s an age-old riddle: if you have a perfect sphere with a perfectly reflective inner surface, will light bounce around inside it forever? The answer is pretty obvious when you think it thro…

Using A Laser To Blast Away A Bayer Array

A Bayer array, or Bayer filter, is what lets a digital camera take color photos. It’s an array of tiny color filters that sit on top of a camera’s CCD. The filter makes it so that each …