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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
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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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:
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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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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