Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MAKE @ Engadget Expand 2014: Public Lab – DIY Sample Tester”.
Hi, i’m nick normal and i’m here with jeff one of the co-founders of public lab he’s gon na walk us through their open source, citizen science, kit, you’re also an insert coin contender uh. Can you walk us through uh, your spectrometer kit here? So, basically, we’ve been working on an inexpensive way for people to go out and measure oil pollution directly by themselves in a diy manner. Basically, if you find something some residue or you live near a spill and you find a tarball, you can take a small amount of it, dilute it in mineral oil and shine an ultraviolet light through it. In this case, a laser what’s interesting is that different types of oils each have a different color of fluorescence. So what we did is we designed a very inexpensive spectrometer. We have a few different models, but one of them is actually papercraft this one folds up out of a single sheet of paper, and you add a piece of a dvd like this.
You actually cut open a dvd-r to make it you put that right there and you attach it to your smartphone or to a webcam, and then you can use our open source software online uh. The hardware is also open source to upload analyze and compare the samples to known samples of oil which we have in our index on here. So yeah are you? Are you sort of geotagging that data then yeah? You can on the website for sure, and i think what we’d like to do is support people who are affected by oil pollution to build a case and collect evidence about that and get really engaged in activism around oil and gas accountability, and are you selling? This is it free. We are selling them.
We have different models, so this is the paper one which you can also see down here. Um, that’s only ten dollars. We have a kit, that’s uh, based on a conduit box.
This one’s been sort of hacked, but you can get the basic idea that plugs in over usb and that’s forty dollars. That’S great and again it’s jeff with publiclab.org. Is that correct great? Thank you so much! You .
