UV Photography Box Is Great For Shooting Fancy Rocks

February 19, 2023 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

If you want to shoot photographs of various fluorescent UV-related phenomena, it’s hard to do so when ambient light is crowding out your subject. For this work, you’ll want a dedicated UV photography box, and [NotLikeALeafOnTheWind] has a design that might just work for you.

The build is set up for both UVA and UVC photography. Due to the danger posed by the latter, and even the former in some cases, the builder recommends never using the box with a direct-view camera. If it must be done, the eyepiece should be covered to avoid any exposure to harmful light. The key rule? Never look directly into a UV source.

Light sources that can be used include UV LEDs, lamps, and tubes. The box is sealed to keep out external light. It then features a turntable that can be manipulated from outside the box, allowing samples inside to be rotated as necessary. Using a camera with a macro or wide-angled lens is recommended for the work.

The photographs taken inside the box are stunning. They remind us of childhood museum trips, where we marvelled at the magic of the fluorescent rock displays. We’ve featured some other great fluorescence projects before, too. If you’re cooking up your own great scientific builds in the lab, we’d love to see those too. Hit us up on the tipsline!

UV EPROM Eraser In A Toolbox

October 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Devon Croy] belongs to a hackerspace that works hard to keep hardware from going to the landfill. He found they were in possession of over a hundred Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory chips (EPROM). Not to be confused with EEPROM, which are electronically erasable, these EPROM chips require a strong source of UV light to blank the old data before they can be written again.

Instead of buying a tool to erase two or three chips at a time he built his own bulk EPROM eraser from an old metal toolbox. He used parts from a fluorescent black light and acquired a new bulb that generates light in the UVC spectrum, the band which works as an eraser for the chips. After bolting the parts into the case he added a spring-loaded timer knob and a safety switch that kills the power when the case is opened, similar to the UV exposure box we looked at yesterday.

Of course, if you don’t need a bulk eraser you could shop some garage sales for a UV pacifier cleaner which can also erase EPROM chips.