June 4, 2019
Bulding a spectrometer from a webcam
All of the ideas here have been played with and then abandoned as we decided
it was money well spent to acquire a BTC100 spectroscope for $200 on Ebay
and to use it instead.
The OPL spectrograph
This is where my webcam idea began. You get your hands on a diffraction grating.
What my friends did was to use an OPL spectrograph as the source for a grating.
Then you provide an image sensor -- a point and shoot camera was used for this.
My friends were experimenting with this in early January 2020,
using a spectroscope cobbled together in this fashion to
analyze the fluorescence from Uranium minerals.
OPL is a company in England. They say that both the "pocket" and "teaching" model use a 600 line per mm grating.
The pocket model is 55mm long, 12.5mm wide.
The teaching model is 104mm long, 25mm wide.
My buddies are using the teaching model of the OPL.
The following writeup is by Paul Adams who pioneered all this.
The "ImageJ" software package takes the spectrum out of the image file.
Optics factory claims, "It is the same spectroscope that JTV.COM sells for $99".
Pi based spectrometer
This article appeared in October of 2022.
Other notes and ideas
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org