After a few years, we're returning to one of our oldest kits to update and improve it, building on lots of community-contributed ideas, improvements, and refinements. This page collects resources, questions and activities related to the design.
## Quick start
To get started assembling your spectrometer, try:
Assemble your spectrometer or Get a kit
The first link also includes the design files for printing. Or,
## Design goals
Our goals were:
- more rigid/robust
- printable on non-black paper
- easier to cut out with just scissors
- put more of the instructions on the object itself, [like on the Antikythera Mechanism](https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/05-04-2016/tweaks-to-foldable-mini-spectrometer-design)
Keep in mind -- this is the "introductory" design intended to onboard newcomers to the project, so we're trying to make it as easy as possible to build. Once you've made this, you're ready to move on to more complex projects, like [scanning, sample preparation, and more robust designs](/wiki/spectrometry).
We haven't gotten all the way there on every goal -- we'd hoped to [make a version that required no glue](https://www.instagram.com/p/BTg-ixkguxq/) -- just locking tabs -- but we just couldn't keep it small enough to be printed on a folded-in-half letter sheet. See [this note](https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/05-04-2016/tweaks-to-foldable-mini-spectrometer-design), [this](https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/07-06-2017/scissors-only-build-of-wider-papercraft-spectrometer), and [some of these photos](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/papercraftspec/) for my process of integrating all these changes, and see [this page](https://publiclab.org/contributors/spectrometry) for some of the many many people who've contributed.
[](https://publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/022/676/original/Screenshot_2017-11-30_at_12.50.12_PM.png)
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## Activities
[activities:papercraft-spec]
## Questions
[activities:papercraft-spec]