The Atomic Spectra Database (ASD) from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology is a well known tool which contains a large amount of precisely measured electronic transitions in atoms, i.e. spectral lines. Its data is a reference for many fields in science. So, is it possible to build a spectrometer at home which reproduces their accuracy?
After over ten years, my Rigol DS2202 oscilloscope’s Horizontal adjustment knob unfortunately started to behave erratically, randomly zooming in and out instead of what it was supposed to do. So I decided it was in need of a replacement.
The Raman spectrometer we are developing has a high-resolution light microscope. For uneven surfaces, though, the small depth of focus often makes it hard to recognize what’s going on, since only a small part of the image is actually in focus, like this: Since we can automatically adjust the focus, though, I recently developed a feature which creates a stack of images at different focal points and stitches the sharp […]
During the current Corona crisis, I find myself having a lot of spare time. Instead of using that for something useful, I ended up playing a lot of Dominion, a board game I can highly recommend checking out. It has very good replay value, and especially works well for two players (which many other board games don’t). Since that wasn’t unproductive enough, I figured hey, I could instead instruct a […]
As I am writing this, I am sitting in a train home from Akademy 2018, KDE’s annual developer conference, which took place in Vienna this year. Akademy always is a great mix of some talks, some socializing with people you otherwise only communicate with through mailing lists or IRC, and some hacking, and this year’s conference was no exception to this. In this post, I will detail some of the […]
Akademy, KDE’s annual developer conference, is over — and as always, it was a great experience! Thanks a lot to the local organization team, and of course to all the nice people attending and discussing things. Akademy is typically a mix of hacking, visiting workshops and talks, and socializing with other KDE people. In the KDevelop workshop for example, we discussed about the future of the project — which issues […]
I started to implement multiple cursor and selection support in KDE’s famous text editor kate a while ago, but eventually didn’t quite have the time to finalize it. I am currently at Akademy in Spain, KDE’s annual developer conference, and decided that would be a good time to pick it up again and make it actually work. Here it is in action: What does it do? It allows you to […]
Introduction This article compares some of the less obvious details of fourier transform spectrometers and classical grating spectrometers. It contains some apparently not-widely-known observations I made recently, but is probably not interesting to you if you are not into spectroscopy. This is also why I will skip explaining how the two spectrometers work. The article will first compare the two types of spectrometers in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, and then […]
From my last electronics project, I had some leftover laser diodes. Because it would be very very sad to just have them lie around, I decided I should build something out of them. And since it’s a laser, it would be stupid to do something which doesn’t exploit the coherence properties of the light it emits, no? Thus, I attempted to build a fourier transform spectrometer. The setup is shown […]
Today’s network backbones don’t use copper wires any more — they use lasers to transmit information. The laser light usually propagates in a fiber, but while convenient, this isn’t strictly necessary; you can also send the laser light through the air in a collimated beam, like an ordinary laser pointer. Because this sounds cool, I thought I could build something like that. Here’s the prototype: Concept For simplicity, I decided […]