Hi, all! We're glad to see that folks are receiving the last part of their OTKs, and starting to assemble them! Please be careful with your lasers -- check out this laser warning notice for more advice on safe usage. (And thanks to @Craig for the lead image of his unboxing!)

We're now announcing the schedule for the beta program. Each week, on Wednesdays, we'll be hosting a Q&A and open chat session which we highly encourage you to join. If you aren't able to make this time, please leave comments in the research note we'll be posting each week, to stay in touch. Also, please try to get documentation for what you've done posted before the meeting for that week, or shortly afterwards if you have pending questions.

Our meetings will be 30 minutes, and @ygzstc, @warren, @gretchen and @stevie will be around for each one.

Kickoff meeting

The first, kickoff meeting will be on Wednesday, Sept 30, at 1pm Eastern Time (ET), in the Public Lab chatroom:

http://publiclab.org/chat

Schedule

The schedule for the assembly and testing will be as follows, with the date of each meeting:

Week 1 (Sept 30): construction & calibration

Week 2 (Oct 7): preparing samples, scanning and uploading

Week 3 (Oct 14): discuss, wrapup

Week 4 (Oct 21): next steps: followup challenges announced

The schedule is also now posted on the Oil Testing Kit Beta Program wiki page

Start now!

That said, please begin assembling and try calibrating your instruments! You can find instructions here:

• Spectrometer construction
• Oil Testing Kit construction
• Calibration

if you have questions, post them here and/or bring them to the Wednesday chat. Thanks and good luck to our beta program participants, and we look forward to hearing from you!

@eustatic, @cquijano84, @Tofu, @ronhuber, @norby, @uprmotero, @Craig, @tmccaffr, @Charles_Hamilton, @mahsa, @JayB, @MelissaN, @LKStendie, @wsg, @zhughbanks, @JeanellSullivan, @Webstertiums, @emilycheung17, @ethanbass, @Cindy_ExCiteS, @chongyukwai, @drocheleau, @gracecagle, @Bluemountainsurfer