There are so many budget friendly portable spectrometers available, I thought I'd post some photos of when I opened one, an hopocolor HPSC330, to replace the battery and recalibrate it afterwards. It seems to use a crosses Czerny-Turner geometry with a linear CCD

I figured out the tricks of how to cut thick boro now:
* A tap wheel cutter with a lot of pressure
* Take note of tin and air side, in my case I use the same side the factory score marks are
* Tap the score both sides with a hammer/end of glass cutter
* Be decisive when you break

Does anyone here know how to cut thick (6.5mm) borosilicate glass, especially cuts close to the edge? I've tried carbide and diamonds cutters, diamond with a heavy but smooth score seems to work best but I'm still having issues with it deviating to the side when close to an edge.

Have you ever had the need for a custom size glass filter or first surface mirror or need many at a low cost? You should know cutting them yourself from a larger stock is a lot cheaper and not nearly as hard as you'd think with a regular high quality glass cutter.

Of course you can combine filters such as glass filters with gel filters for higher OD or dielectric filter for sharp cutoff with gel filters to reduce leakage of stray light at off angles. Often a higher OD is worth it even if it reduces your transmission in your pass band

*Lighting gel filters, especially Lee branded ones. Spectra are publicly available, OD can be high and cutoff sharp and select ones have high transmission in the pass band, that and being very thin allows them to be stacked using OCA sheets for very high OD and sharp cutoff. Very affordable

* Absorptive glass filters from aliexpress, often more of less copies of the schott lineup, decently sharp cutoff, mostly only usable as longpass, high OD possible depending on thickness, easy to cut and grind to size from larger 100x100mm sheets if needed

Building a fluorescence based piece of equipment on a budget? Here are my top 3 budget options, all very usable with different Pros/Cons:

* Small narrow bandpass filters from Aliexpress, around 1€ for 8x8mm, decent OD, 20-80nm FWHM, angle sensitive. Ideal for non imaging purposes or shallow angles

Science/academic peeps: there was a thread over at the other place (or maybe a blog post) a while back on how to write a good letter of rec for a prospective grad student. Anyone have a link handy or remember whose thread/post it was? Thanks! 🧪

Does anyone know where to get the control software for the Crystal Technology AODS 20160? The one website I've found doesn't have the download link anyone and I can't find it anywhere.

I might be buying some rare earth oxides, including lanthanide oxides, from China soon. Just wondering if anyone needs anything in that direction, if so I can add it to my order.

Does anyone know a good way to detect a 100kHz signal? It is a sine wave with a level of +/-5V max usually in the mVs. I've tried the classic dual op amp/two diodes full wave precision rectifier and it works in an ideal situation but doesn't work IRL or with realistic simulations

You need to have a pretty big autoclave for that think to even fit in upright

It could result in differences of the angle of the scattered light due to the difference in particle size, think like FC front scatter. If there are differences in the device that could have a large impact

Might work well when you want to show someone paper chromatography

Sometimes you do what you gotta do to get your measurements

This reminded me of something, maybe not comedy,

"I was thinking if we had time we'd make a full-length motion picture feature about what it's like to be in academic science. But then I realized... this move has already been made. It's called Les Misérables."

-Morris Maduro (wormguy119)

Same thing on here, if you know someone you want to bring over to here, let me know, I got one code.

Sometimes you just don't get a lot of space to work with. There will be modules where the headers are, one Arduino Nano ESP32 and one ADS1259 ADC

100V is kinda slow. Sure the slow gels are the best ones I've done for larger fragments. But sometimes you want to resolve small primer dimers or just don't want to wait almost and hour and then I'm glad I can run my gels at 300V for 15-20mins in 1x LAB and even those gels are publication quality.