What is Spectral Workbench?

SpectralWorkbench.org is a web based application to collect, archive, share, and analyze spectral data, for Public Lab DIY spectrometers and other spectrometers.

With it, you can:

• connect your USB Desktop Spectrometry Kit
• scan and save samples
• wavelength calibrate your spectrometer
• plot light intensity as a function of wavelength (average digital consumer cameras have a range of 400 to 700 nm)
• create sets of multiple spectra to visually compare and analyze scans
• download CSV data for offline analysis
• view others' data and discuss
• find similar data in a database of over 60k spectra

No download is required -- just a web connection. The Chrome browser works best, but most standard-compliant browsers are supported. It is possible to use from an Android smartphone, preferably with the Firefox browser which allows you to specify which camera to look through.

Contents

• Learn to use the software
  • Learn about the available tools
  • Learn about Calibration
  • Learn about the Snapshots system
  • Learn about the Operations system
• Spectrometry in general
• Applications & uses
• Construction
  • Desktop Spectrometry Kit
  • Foldable Mini-Spectrometer
• Troubleshooting
• API Docs

Intro video

Development

Do you code? The codebase of Spectral Workbench is available at https://github.com/publiclab/spectral-workbench. The server is written in Ruby on Rails, with a lot of client side code in JavaScript. You can read about the JavaScript API here.

We really need more developers, so if you are interested, please get involved! A great place to start is the "plots-dev" mailing list for software developers: http://publiclab.org/wiki/developers

FAQ

We're collecting and working our way through a range of questions about Spectral Workbench -- if you can contribute your own questions, or answer others', please do!

Ask a question about Spectral Workbench