Anyway, I've been discussing making the poor-mans spectrometer amongst people, and I've heard some new ideas like using photo-resistors wrapped in color gel filters(that might be fun to and you could make it all analog easily after eye-balling the calibration from a known light graph and use a cheap led matrix display, I thought of using a honeycomb of photoresistors inside a spectrograph.

But as far as a 'project' I think it might be better to stay on track with the webcam idea as they're readily available and already assembled so the learning curve will be less like a cliff and more like plug and play. I've been made aware there may be some limitations of doing it this way.. 1) some webcams apparantly auto-color ballance (not this cheap one I've got) 2) the webcam's sensor detects RGB intensity levels, as far as I know, not UV V Vb bV IR etc... anything outside the visable range however most digital cameras do pick up IR maybe some are filtered but not all, but if you want to test yours turn it on and grab the remote to the television and point it at the camera's lens and push some buttons, if you see light in the video your camera is detecting IR, not that that matters for the purpose of identifying how much red or blue you're getting from your particular bulb at whatever its age and hours of use may be. blah blah words words... anyway I'm collecting the nescicary resources to start working on the software. My insomnia has been bad lately so it's likely there may be a few days of innactivity soon.
farredeyed Reviewed by farredeyed on . Crackpot Growing Theories 101 Any information contained in this thread is to be considered theoretical, experimental, and otherwise completely nuts. If you're looking for a how-to this is probably not the right place. I'm starting this thread to discuss the possibilites of creating a poor-mans spectrometer from a webcam and a home-made spectragraph consisting of an old CD and cardboard tubing. This is probably going to be my first order of business. I am also proposing growing with lasers, that's right, I said it, Rating: 5