The Pulsar Engineering Community Board

First, let me welcome you aboard :) Don't worry about not knowing a thing in optics, that's the case for a lot of people here :) I had no formal optical training and I learned it myself during my spare time! All the instruments that I present here and on thepulsar.be were especially designed to teac...

It's for the custom TEC/LD driver you don't need it if you use a different driver/off the shelf one.

Here is the file

You can move those elements without any issue :) About the beamsplitter, I would rather use a beam sampler . The difference being mainly in the transmission/reflection ratio. If you use a 50:50 beamsplitter, you will loose half of the laser in the forward direction and half of the Raman scattering i...

You don't need to fine tune the exposure for similar samples :) the scale of the black curve also automatically compensate for different exposure time and gain also. From the raw signal, it looks like you have a lot of offset. This is usually found when you have light leakage into the spectrometer o...

No, unfortunately. The liquid cuvette is designed to focus the beam at the center of the tube. If you put powder inside, the beam will stop at the wall and be too broad to collect effectively the photons. It's also the reason the liquid cuvette only works with clear (ie non-turbid) liquids.

The axis are remapped such that the full plot x axis correspond to the image's vertical axis. I can swap in the v2.0 of the software (développement not started yet...). I could also add a mode to display directly the image of the camera. The cleanliness of the spot is usually good with the cuvette a...

I have actually never tried. I would expect it to work but maybe orientation of the sample could change light intensity.

If you do some tests, please share your results

I can give a brief explanation for a better understanding :) The laser spot is re-imaged on the slit which clips the width (but not height) of the spot. This clipped spot is re-imaged again on the camera after horizontal dispersion by the grating. The spectrum, in black, is obtained by summing the c...

For calibration, cheap PMMA fibers might do the trick. As always, it's a trial and error process but I don't see reason it wouldn't work. What I did in the past (for other projects) was to buy audio patches from store like Wal-Mart and to cut the end, print or machine a custom connector and glue it....