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 …