The Pulsar Engineering Community Board

I use hubs.com and the price is about $250 USD, though the quality is very good. Takes about 2 weeks for them. There are cheaper vendors, maybe you could find $150 from a low price one. The SLS technique is not something most people would have at home, there are builds here with PLA but it's not id...

These sound like good ideas! Keep us posted.

As hinted, Luc has released his write up on tuning the cheaper Thorlabs laser: https://www.thepulsar.be/article/tuning-thorlabs-cps532-laser-modes And, wow, this seems like a very encouraging development. Lots to unpack here. I am particularly interested in the use of a Peltier module to heat the la...

One thing that I think might be really useful would be to separate the parts into FDM-compatible "housing" pieces, and CNCed pieces where precision is important. This would allow our community to share/swap parts more easily, as I'm sure some of us have access to FDM printers and others ha...

Cool, that matches with my understanding as well. The biggest challenge is getting the laser light well-collimated so that it enters the fiber efficiently. I'm going to file this into the "problems to solve in the near future" bucket. I was pleased to see that Aseq Instruments uses a mostl...

Right, that was kind of dumb wording-- What I meant to say was that it's hard to compare a sensor to a finished product in terms of raw performance, because there are indeed so many variables. I am quite certain that we'll need to design our own modular sensor if we want to get the price floor down ...

Thanks for your honesty, Andy-- Even deciding that it's not possible I think is a useful result! I'm willing to accept that we can't do better than Luc's original design, but I'm finding this exercise useful in helping me understand what the tradeoffs are in Raman spectroscopy. I tracked down Luc's ...

I would love to get the ball rolling on one of these builds. The first step seems to be settling on a suitable laser and sensor. I'm still not sure how to pick a good low-cost laser, but presumably someone has done this research already? Regarding the sensor I'd be very tempted to continue on the pa...

Thanks for providing this, Andy. I found some pretty informative videos regarding Raman noise that the Bruker corporation put out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1xS_oC1arM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQMr-xflXlI (In fact, this whole video series is excellent. Looking forward to watching a...

Something I've been wondering about: How much can software help with a noisy sensor? Could we run thousands of readings through an denoising algorithm and get a stable result?