new post, update on start of beta

Greg Austic

unread,

Jan 20, 2014, 10:45:23 AM1/20/14

to phot...@googlegroups.com

Hey folks, just posted with some new data here. We took a unit out to the greenhouse and collected some nice data!

Also, we've been preparing to ship units, and we've made a fairly significant redesign to the detector. That new design is going to improve our signal to noise by about 100 times, which is great, but it's also going to push back our ship date. Here's why we felt it was worth delaying to make sure we got this feature included:

1) The new design should be capable of detecting more interesting stuff. Since many of our beta testers are plant scientists, we felt that they would appreciate that additional capability up front and not have to pay another 100 bucks later to get the quality they know they’ll want.

2) The detector actually addresses some issues we had with the old design. Specifically, we had little spikes in the response when applying a bright saturating light (you can see them in the raw fluorescence data in the above screenshot) – this always has to be removed in post-processing the data. Also, in the old design the detector could be completely saturated with light causing the response to become meaningless. As a result, you had to adjust the brightness of the LED more frequently to ensure that any given measurement didn’t saturate the detector. This requires a lot of end-user adjustment which may confuse or turn off users, especially beginners. The new design addresses this problem.

Sorry for the delay but we hope you think it's worth it once all is said and done!

Greg

--

Greg Austic

2198 Seminole Dr.

Okemos, MI 48864

(919) 545 1083

Work -www.photosynq.org

Personal - www.austiclabs.com