Raspberry pi bassed spectroscopy

Abstract

Raspberry Pi (RPI) is a tiny single-board computer which can be fitted into a box along with photo-detecting circuits to build an affordable spectrometer. The Tkinter (TK) graphic user interface (GUI) written in Python (PY) displays the output voltage, power and absorbance of light. A Raspberry Pi based (RPI) spectrometer was developed to measure the ability of chemical substance to absorb light by measuring the power of light as a light source passed through a sample chemical substance. This method can be used to measure the concentration of the soil nutrients in a soil extract. The higher the concentration of the soil nutrients of a soil extract, the higher the light absorbance of a sample. The absorbance of light was computed based on Beer- Lambert Law. The low cost RPI based spectrometer costs 80% less than the spectrometer available in the market and is capable of recording the absorbance measurements up to 5 samples. The performance of this prototype shows that it is possible to build the spectrometer using open-source software and hardware.