Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 243

FIGURE 6.87 The Spectruino.
The Spectruino is more robustly built as it consists of a stainless steel and aluminum case.
However, the design still suffers from the detector being fixed to the case with a material that
is affected by temperature, which limits its use for some high-precision applications. This, of
course, is only the beginning of open-source spectroscopy as the projects from Myspectral and
Public Laboratory are growing and improving as more scientists add to the designs and soft-
ware. For fans of Star Trek, it is prety clear where we are going—and in fact we are already at
the beginning stages of an open-source tricorder. 100 Many of the Arduino-based scientific tools
that have already been developed can be integrated together, so as each group or team of spe-
cialists continue to work on their own piece of the scientific puzzle, once it becomes developed
enough, it will be possible to bring them all come together to form a tool that really is right
out of the science iction topics. A very ambitious open-source Tricorder Project is now well
into development. 101 The Science Tricorder Mark 2 prototype sensor board shown in Figure
6.88 contains 10 different sensing modalities, organized into three main themes: atmospheric
sensors (temperature, humidity, and pressure), electromagnetic sensors (magnetic flux, color,
an IR thermometer, and ambient light levels), and spatial sensors (GPS location, ultrasonic dis-
tance sensor, accelerometer and a gyroscope). 102 Again, this is only scratching the surface of
what we can now do with sensor technology and there are many organizations pushing the
technology forward. 103 It is clear we will see more increasingly sophisticated open-source spec-
trometry projects in the near future.