No, there’s no typo in the title. While this post does describe building an instrument (a colorimeter) from scratch, it also uses the Scratch programming language to control the operation of the instrument. Read on to learn the why’s and how’s.

This is the central location for all of my posts related to a Raspberry Pi based spectrometer built with Legos and controlled using Wolfram Mathematica.
No, there’s no typo in the title. While this post does describe building an instrument (a colorimeter) from scratch, it also uses the Scratch programming language to control the operation of the instrument. Read on to learn the why’s and how’s.
One of my DIY spectrometer designs was published in The MagPi. You can view issue 24 here or you can check out this github link which contains the word document.
As one of my ‘loyal readers’ has pointed out (thanks Nick), the schematic in the MagPi has the LED in the wrong way. Be sure to connect the negative side of the LED to Ground and the positive side to GPIO25.
This post is a reprint of an article I wrote on my earlier website. I’ve tried to update the links and images, but may have missed a few.
I recently purchased the camera that attaches to a Raspberry Pi and thought about how one might be able to make a spectrophotometer using the camera as a ccd-like detector. This work is still in progress, but with relatively few steps, I was able to get an instrument up and running (and even calibrated – sort of).
This is a classic article which I’ve restored from a former version of my website. It has been modified from the original version.