Spectrometer Software

Useful Links

Here is the link to the spectroscopy page.  Here is one to the optics page.  Here is the one to the page about 3D printed parts.  Here is the link to the page about lamps.  Here is the link to the  spectrometer electronics.  

Getting the software

When I sell hardware, it comes with the firmware installed and executable user interface programs on a usb memory stick.  Alternatively, you can download firmware and user interface source code from GitHub and compile it yourself.  Here is the link to the source code for the firmware.  Here is the source code for the spectrometer general user interface.  Here is the source code for the spectrometer calibration user interface.

A note about user interfaces

A spectrometer is a complex instrument with a number of applications.  Since different users will want to process data differently, no one user interface configuration will be ideal for all users.  We have two user interfaces, one for general usage and the other for calibrating the spectrometer and writing parameters to non-volatile memory.  The general usage interface was written for solution phase absorbance spectroscopy.  

General User Interface

This video introduces a minimal user interface that will connect to the Teensy based WheeTrometer, allow you to vary the integration time, acquire a spectrum and save the data.  The code for the minimal user interface can be found here.  It is intended to give users who wish to modify the code a starting point for an interface that works but is not crowded with unneeded features. 

Calibration Interface

This is a video demonstrating an interface that allows you to (1) assign a serial number to each of your Teensy based spectrometers, (2)  calibrate the intensity parameters for baseline and saturation light levels, (3) calibrate the wavelength axis.  The user interface can  write calibration constants into the instrument's non-volatile memory for later use with the general user interface. 

Older user interface video

This is an older video that shows a lot of the functionality that can be built into the instrument

Spectra in this video were recorded using an interface written for a spectrometer controlled by a Texas Instruments microcontroller, not a Teensy.

Spectrometer Firmware

Firmware is computer code that is embedded in the microcontroller.  We used the Arduino Interactive Development Environment to write the code for our spectrometer.  To code the Teensy 4.0 with Arduino, you will need to download and install something called Teensyduino.  Files and instructions for loading Teensyduino are here.  Other than that it is pretty much like programming any other Arduino based microcontroller.

The firmware can be downloaded from our Github page.