Hi everyone,
I found this forum when trying to build my own spectrometer, and I've seen that thankfully someone from here has already purchased and tried the "ThunderOptics" spectrometer, so I didn't need to bother with it, so already thanks guys!
However, as you know there are a lot of resources online on how to build your own spectrometer, and I decided I should go ahead and try it.
The basics were simple enough, get a high def camera, remove IR filter, set up a diffraction grating, create ingress point of light and voila done.
Well, it kinda went OK, other than the fact that I realized that the enclosure I was using was solid to the naked eye, but see-through in IR ( go figure.. ).
One thing that has eluded me though is the slit, or the input where the light comes from. From research I found out that people who can achieve beautiful discreet and razor-sharp diffraction lines used very precise slits. One build where I actually do know the details used a 15 micron slit, so I figured that could be a nice target. Some people used actual razorblades sort of pushed against each other, so I got the idea what could work. I imagined, that something like this would be pretty easy to manufacture the market would be flooded with different slits from different manufactureres and the sort as it is with many other thing. Boy was I wrong... The only two viable options I found so far was from ThorLabs ( VA100/M - Adjustable Mechanical Slit ) and EdmundOptics.
But at this point I'm a bit hesitant to shell out around 300 dollars for this project.
( Especially considering the fact that I've just seen a secondhand OceanInsight USB 2000 for 650 dollars... )
So my question is this:
Do any of you have an idea as to how I could resolve this issue? ( either a design or a product idea )
I found this forum when trying to build my own spectrometer, and I've seen that thankfully someone from here has already purchased and tried the "ThunderOptics" spectrometer, so I didn't need to bother with it, so already thanks guys!
However, as you know there are a lot of resources online on how to build your own spectrometer, and I decided I should go ahead and try it.
The basics were simple enough, get a high def camera, remove IR filter, set up a diffraction grating, create ingress point of light and voila done.
Well, it kinda went OK, other than the fact that I realized that the enclosure I was using was solid to the naked eye, but see-through in IR ( go figure.. ).
One thing that has eluded me though is the slit, or the input where the light comes from. From research I found out that people who can achieve beautiful discreet and razor-sharp diffraction lines used very precise slits. One build where I actually do know the details used a 15 micron slit, so I figured that could be a nice target. Some people used actual razorblades sort of pushed against each other, so I got the idea what could work. I imagined, that something like this would be pretty easy to manufacture the market would be flooded with different slits from different manufactureres and the sort as it is with many other thing. Boy was I wrong... The only two viable options I found so far was from ThorLabs ( VA100/M - Adjustable Mechanical Slit ) and EdmundOptics.
But at this point I'm a bit hesitant to shell out around 300 dollars for this project.
( Especially considering the fact that I've just seen a secondhand OceanInsight USB 2000 for 650 dollars... )
So my question is this:
Do any of you have an idea as to how I could resolve this issue? ( either a design or a product idea )
