Optical spectrometer and PAR meter.

[darrrenjmartin]

Is there any interest for the club to purchase a spectrometer. With all the slidey adjusty things in the many of the LED's , it is very much a neccessity now, in combination, with a par meter. BRS did a video on trying to reproduce a ATI actinic bulb spectra with LED's. I have been following a publiclab.org quasi open source design and software for years. I think since 2014?
Basically you build a DIY device that makes a rainbow. The device takes an image of the rainbow or has a web cam video feed into a computer. This is followed by the quasi open source software to Graphically display the the rainbow spectra in various ways. This image analyzer software (imo) is the secret sauce of a inexpensive spectrometer. The device and be as simple a cardboard cutout with a mirror and defraction grid.
This software depicts the relative proprtionality of spectrum. eg. how the intensities of the 420nm and 460nm compare. The PAR meter combines all spectra to one value(provided all channels are on).
I have not seen any evidence that as the LEDs channels are turned brighter that each channel intensity/PAR acts in a relative and linear way.

thunderoptics.fr has been around for years. For the money, this is a nice canned package.
There or two grades. 120 and 440. Their design is in a aluminum housing.

 

[jcook54]

Yo, I can get with this idea. The PAR meters have been a hit with lots and lots of folks getting and signing up for readings. Have you got a link to one that BRS uses? I'm curious to check it out.

The biggest issue we have is getting the PAR meters out to the members. Lots of time it's me or @Doberman13 who just come out and do the readings in person. We require a large deposit for folks to "Rent" it even though it's 100% refundable once we get the units back. The way we do this is a little clunky and a lot of times it's easier to just go and take the reading in person but it does take a lot of time.

Ideally we would have one well-known ARC member that takes care of this for us. Kind of a PAR reading quarterback for the whole club. (If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know.) I mention this because the Spectrometer is a great idea but it wold be more work for a volunteer and we're a bit limited on those at the moment.