Right now I am working on wiring up each sensor individually and testing out Arduino sketches.

I have the IR temp nearly sensor wired up, just waiting on a capacitor set Charlie ordered this week. I have found found Arduino libraries that should give me everything I need to control the sensor over a serial connection. Charlie and I decided in the HIP meeting on Wednesday that I should hold off on integrating the sensors with a BLE shield until he has BLE set up on the Android/Field Day side. In the meantime I will figure out how the Arduino should package data onboard to send to Field Day.

I have started working with the pH and conductivity probes from AtlasScientific. I’m really excited about the quality of the documentation on the website and it has been easy to move forward so far.

The next steps are wiring up the laser in the laser mount and beginning building the optical density rig with Lego. I also want to look into the cheapest way to carry out the Munsell color test. I’ve found this simple visible light spectrometer that uses an Arduino board and has pretty detailed calibration options already built into the software. I’m looking more into that along with laser wiring this week. Yay spectroscopy!

Here’s a little demo film of the spectrometer. We wouldn’t use it for substance identification like he does, but for something much simpler – color detection!

Spectrometer_demo