Loptr
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Spectrophotometer Recommendations
I am looking to purchase a spectrophotometer and was looking at a Cary 50, but learned that the PC card required to make it usable is ridiculously
expensive.
I am looking for one that can handle low range uv as well as vis l
wavelengths. The Cary 50 could handle from 190nm to 1100nm.
Does anyone have any recommendations, or possibly, one they wish to sell?
"Question everything generally thought to be obvious." - Dieter Rams
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JohnnyBuckminster
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I have experience with older UV/VIS machines from Varian (now Agilent Technologies), Jasco, and GBC. The manufacturers do not show any enthusiasm to
provide support, and spare parts, if possible to find at all, are horrendously expensive. The software only runs on W98 or DOS, and the GBC, for
example, needs a PC with a serial connector. If you don't have any in-house expertise with electronics, running an old UV/VIS can be more expensive
than once assumed.
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unionised
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Your best hope is to find someone selling the whole system- the PC, spectrometer and software.
Even then, you might get into s/w licensing issues.
The manufacturers deliberately make things difficult for 2nd hand users because they want to encourage people to buy new kit from them.
Their big market is the pharmaceutical industry which has more money than it knows what to do with, so they are not experienced with or interested in
dealing with hobby chemists.
Last time I was involved with buying instrument control software (admittedly for an LC system which is more complex) it cost about £10,000 (yes, just
the software, not the equipment).
And that was about 20 years ago; I don't want to contemplate what inflation will have done to that price.
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JohnnyBuckminster
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I'm throwing in a survey here,
How many of you visiting this forum would be interested in a project like OpenUV-VIS, like Open Raman (http://www.open-raman.org/), but for UV-VIS?
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Ubya
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a lot.
I built a few years ago a simple UV-ish-VIS spectrophotometer out of a webcam and a piece of diffraction grating film. It works, very crudely.
After that i started studying a bit what was available online. I found a few projects:
https://www.fzu.cz/~dominecf/spek2/vu.pdf
https://curiousscientist.tech/blog/tcd1304-based-spectromete...
https://tcd1304.wordpress.com/
buying the sensor is easy, interfacing it with a microcontroller isn't, and breakout boards for these linear CCDs are stupidly expensive.
if there was a kit I could buy, I'd do it. The cost of materials isn't really high, but having a proper casing is much harder to do without a 3d
printer or a cnc mill
(Spectrum of beta carotene I took with my crappy webcam-spectrophotometer)
[Edited on 18-5-2023 by Ubya]
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feel free to correct my grammar, or any mistakes i make
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Loptr
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I think it would be interesting. I wasn't aware of OpenRaman and will definitely be checking it out, as that could be a similar step in the direction
that I want to take.
There are several projects on YouTube that have accomplished UV-VIS, so several good resources to reuse. I was just hoping to get into the lower nm
wavelengths with some fluorescent compounds, and I didn't know if USB cameras could reliably get into the <200 nm range.
"Question everything generally thought to be obvious." - Dieter Rams
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