Introducing a new papercraft spectrometer: v2!

[Jeffrey Warren]

Hi all -- after a few years, we're returning to one of our oldest kits to update and improve it, building on lots of community-contributed ideas, improvements, and refinements.

Our goals were:

• more rigid/robust
• printable on non-black paper
• easier to produce one at a time or in quantity (laser printable!)
• easier to cut out with just scissors
• put more of the instructions on the object itself, like on the Antikythera Mechanism

Keep in mind -- this is the "introductory" design intended to onboard newcomers to the project, so we're trying to make it as easy as possible to build. Once you've made this, you're ready to move on to more complex projects, like scanning, sample preparation, and more robust designs.

We haven't gotten all the way there on every goal -- we'd hoped to make a version that required no glue -- just locking tabs -- but we just couldn't keep it small enough to be printed on a folded-in-half letter sheet. See this note, this, and some of these photos for our process of integrating all these changes, and see this page for some of the many many people who've contributed -- most recently at a session at the Barnraising!

Read more and give it a try at: https://publiclab.org/wiki/papercraft-spectrometer

Also now available in the Public Lab store! Support Public Lab by ordering one today!

Thanks, all --

Jeff & the Kits initiative