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Polarimeter with RaspberryPi (instructables.com)

Instructables.com

One day I came across the website instructables.com [1], which is just amazing. Here you find thousands of projects in many different skills, even baking and outdoor activities, and it is delighting to see the creativity and dedication of so many people. The site provides an easy-to-use interface to create and edit these instructions on how to do things (called "instructable"). That is how I decided to also publish parts of my work there [2].

Polarimeter

During work on the basic principles of a static polarimeter (that is one with no moving parts), I constructed a device for the characterization of sensor heads, which allows to measure the dependency between light intensity and electric resistance with a high accuracy. With some modifications, this could be turned into a "regular" polarimeter, which would be a nice project to combine several technical aspects, like sensors, motors, electronics and programming.

Additional Information

When writing the instructable I concentrated on how I did things, so that somebody would be able to follow the steps and rebuild the project. Also the GUI does not support adding images (for math formulas) into the text. Therefore I skipped a lot of background information like the math behind the scenes, other experimental findings and approaches, which I will add here bit by bit:

Links

  1. instructables.com
  2. Polarimeter with RaspberryPi on instructables