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Question: Desktop Spectrometry Kit to arduino?

jjoll is asking a question about spectrometry: Follow this topic

jjoll asked on June 28, 2017 13:23
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What I want to do or know

hi, has anyone tried to connect Desktop Spectrometer to arduino? is there any online documentation on how to do that? and how to feed data to the arduino for further data processing and analyzing? I want to scan different objects and compare the spectral patterns using arduino. thanks

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5 Comments

  
cfastie commented over 2 years ago

The Public Lab spectrometers rely on cameras to make images of diffraction patterns. So the raw data is a photograph or video frame. Processing the image is done online (Spectral Workbench) or on a PC. An Arduino can control a camera and instruct it to take a photo or save a frame of video. The image would typically be saved to an SD card or sent to a browser or PC.

So the processing and analysis of the spectral image is not done by the spectrometer, and could probably not be done by an Arduino. But an Arduino and TTL camera could replace the camera in a Public Lab spectrometer.

Chris

  
jjoll commented over 2 years ago

thanks cfastie, I have one more question. I was going through the Spectral Workbench website. I noticed that you can extract cvs file of the plots. now I am thinking of letting Spectral Workbench do the image processing and then take the cvs file and feed it to my arduino for the comparison/data analysis. I was wondering if you have any experience with this? or do you know anybody who has attempted to establish a communication between online Spectral Workbench and arduino (so that Spectral Workbench spits out the cvs data automatically to the arduino)?

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warren commented over 2 years ago

There have been some efforts to use linear CCDs with arduinos, which is very cool and bypasses a lot of the mysterious image processing cameras do: https://publiclab.org/notes/shubham/02-01-2016/tiny-spectromter-hacking-a-laser-barcode-scanner

Also there have been several builds around a raspberry pi camera, which is a great camera with low noise and is pretty affordable too:

https://publiclab.org/questions/warren/09-28-2016/upgrade-a-diy-spectrometer-with-a-raspberry-pi-camera

  
jjoll commented over 2 years ago

thanks for the answer Warren, I have one more question. I was going through the Spectral Workbench website. I noticed that you can extract cvs file of the plots. now I am thinking of letting Spectral Workbench do the image processing and then take the cvs file and feed it to my arduino for the comparison/data analysis. I was wondering if you have any experience with this? or do you know anybody who has attempted to establish a communication between online Spectral Workbench and arduino (so that Spectral Workbench spits out the cvs data automatically to the arduino)?

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warren commented over 2 years ago

Hi, I think it's not common because many people find it easier to parse data from a full desktop computer. You might try using a Raspberry Pi which has much of the functionality of a desktop, but I think my own preference would be that if it's already running on a webpage or a full-sized computer, there's not a lot of advantage to transferring it back to an Arduino which is relatively less powerful and harder to work with. But that's just me. As to a solution, you could try sending the data over the serial connection to the Arduino, but that's a bit outside my area of expertise: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Serial


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