Can you make a spectrometer for your home lab all from materials you have sitting around? We might not believe it from a less credible source, but this MIT course does indeed build a spectrometer from foam board using two razor blades as the silt cover and a writable CD as the diffraction grating. The coolest part is removing the metal backing of the CD.
Hackaday reader [gratian] tipped us off about the course available from MIT courseware called Nanomaker. It boils down some fairly complicated experiments to the kind one can do in the home lab without involving thousands of dollars of lab equipment. The whole point is to demystify what we think of as complicated devices and topics surrounding photovoltaics, organic photovoltaics, piezoelectricity and thermoelectricity.
Spectrometers are used to analyze the wavelengths of a light source. Now that you have a measurement tool in hand it’s time to build and experiment with some light sources of your own. Here you can see an LED that is the topic of one of the course labs.
If you have a bit of background in chemistry this is a good step-by-step guide for getting into these types of experiments at home. It reminds us of some of the really cool stuff [Jeri Ellsworth] was doing in her garage lab, like making her own EL panels.
This is awesome!
Also, never thought about peeling of a CD like that. That’s interesting in itself too.
Publiclab.org made this at least 3 years ago. http://store.publiclab.org/products/desktop-spectrometry-kit-3-0
I guess I know what my next project is going to be. Thanks for the article!
This is damn awesome.
Hey Gerrit, you missed a “C” in the heading for this article!
That was me. I fixed it but now it adds a line to the title — d’oh!
Lol, it’s in all-caps too! :P
Doping? Why that’s scandalous!
Russia says it’s OK.
I have never had razor blades in my house. They may be sharp, but does that make them have a straight edge?
Yes that edge evenness is critical to them not peeling a strip of skin off you. If there was a high spot it would gouge you.
They’re related, at least; making them very flat and straight makes them easier to make sharp. (Also, I need to get around to making a script that hides “report comment” behind a second click..)
Just don’t worry about the reporting of comments! There is a minimum threshold of clicks before it goes into moderation, and even after it does [Gerrit], [Benchoff], or another go ‘it’s not spam’ and release it to the masses.
But, if you made the script, there are probably a hundred people here that would download it. So advertise something good to go along with it. ;)
Read the title thought Jeri always Jeri.
Yeah, she was the original chemistry hacker that I was always learning awesome stuff from. I really need to go through her catalog of hacks again on a blustery weekend this winter.