This past week I mostly worked on NIR, the field platform, and a little on the CO2 sensor.

I converted the collected absorbance data from the TI Nano to reflectance, which is better documented for organic content. I reran standards that are a mix of sandy soil with very little organic carbon and compost, which is very high in organic carbon. These are the results:

For reference, this is a figure from Shuo Li et al. [1]

I would really like if the nice peak between 1300-1400 was our organics peak, but I suspect we actually want to focus on the scraggly region out by 1700. My plan is to focus in on this region and increase the sampling rate of the device. The trend here is very promising.

The field platform prototype is coming along. I have incorporated the BLE and Field Day-friendly formatting, but I am getting readings that don’t make sense. This week I will focus more on hardware debugging.

The RGB platform is my next order of business. I am going to start with Munsell color. That will give me a good jumping off point for less crucial things like pH and NPK strip analysis.