The Atomic Spectra Database (ASD) from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology is a well known tool which contains a large amount of precisely measured electronic transitions in atoms, i.e. spectral lines. Its data is a reference for many fields in science. So, is it possible to build a spectrometer at home which reproduces their accuracy? Turns out, it indeed is: Here you can see…
After over ten years, my Rigol DS2202 oscilloscope s Horizontal adjustment knob unfortunately started to behave erratically, randomly zooming in and out instead of what it was supposed to do. So I decided it was in need of a replacement. Part This part fits pretty well: Bourns PEC11R-4115F-S0018 It also has much nicer click feel to it than the original part when turning, making me consider if I…
The Raman spectrometer we are developing has a high-resolution light microscope. For uneven surfaces, though, the small depth of focus often makes it hard to recognize what s going on, since only a small part of the image is actually in focus, like this: Since we can automatically adjust the focus, though, I recently developed a feature which creates a stack of images at different focal points and…
During the current Corona crisis, I find myself having a lot of spare time. Instead of using that for something useful, I ended up playing a lot of Dominion, a board game I can highly recommend checking out. It has very good replay value, and especially works well for two players (which many other board games don t). Since that wasn t unproductive enough, I figured hey, I could instead instruct a…
As I am writing this, I am sitting in a train home from Akademy 2018, KDE s annual developer conference, which took place in Vienna this year. Akademy always is a great mix of some talks, some socializing with people you otherwise only communicate with through mailing lists or IRC, and some hacking, and this year s conference was no exception to this. In this post, I will detail some of the [ ]
Akademy, KDE s annual developer conference, is over and as always, it was a great experience! Thanks a lot to the local organization team, and of course to all the nice people attending and discussing things. Akademy is typically a mix of hacking, visiting workshops and talks, and socializing with other KDE people. In the KDevelop workshop for example, we discussed about the future of the project…
I started to implement multiple cursor and selection support in KDE s famous text editor kate a while ago, but eventually didn t quite have the time to finalize it. I am currently at Akademy in Spain, KDE s annual developer conference, and decided that would be a good time to pick it up again and make it actually work. Here it is in action: What does it do? It allows you to [ ]
Introduction This article compares some of the less obvious details of fourier transform spectrometers and classical grating spectrometers. It contains some apparently not-widely-known observations I made recently, but is probably not interesting to you if you are not into spectroscopy. This is also why I will skip explaining how the two spectrometers work. The article will first compare the two…
From my last electronics project, I had some leftover laser diodes. Because it would be very very sad to just have them lie around, I decided I should build something out of them. And since it s a laser, it would be stupid to do something which doesn t exploit the coherence properties of the light it emits, no? Thus, I attempted to build a fourier transform spectrometer. The setup is shown [ ]
Today s network backbones don t use copper wires any more they use lasers to transmit information. The laser light usually propagates in a fiber, but while convenient, this isn t strictly necessary; you can also send the laser light through the air in a collimated beam, like an ordinary laser pointer. Because this sounds cool, I thought I could build something like that. Here s the prototype:…