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iPhone app uses camera to ID drugs & test purity (DIY Spectrometry)

Enix150

Enix150

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(I wasn't quite sure where to put this, so mods have at it! I hope it isn't considered a testing question; it's really more of an answer... News, if anything.)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jywarren/public-lab-diy-spectrometry-kit/posts/303773

So basically I found this kickstarter project for developing a DIY Spectrometer at home for ~$10 (it uses your webcam!). The blueprints appear to be up and working, and they even have a model for your cell phone. The software works swimmingly, but they still need more donations to develop an open source API!! 4 days left to help here.

Currently they're just using it to test for contaminants in soil and beer/wines, but with a little help from Bluelight we can build our own database of spectra for known drugs and common cutting agents. With something like this we could escape our current culture of ignorance and enter a new world of Harm Reduction! Can you imagine getting your samples identified near-instantly and on-site at a festival?! And I mean a conclusive analysis, not just the regular battery of reagent test results which can get expensive, aren't reusable, and are often inconclusive even when used properly. Either way, I think this will be a great step forward for the educated consumer. Let me know what you all think!
 
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whoa, can't say I understand how is this suppose to work but it sounds fucking awesome ;p

they already got 10x of what they needed so it's happening.
 
^Why's that, Mike? Would you care to elaborate?

Smoothie: The schematics are already available on their site! but the prefabbed ones should be shipped out over the next month or so. The new goal is to get $1o0,o0o (10x the original, but only $2ooo to go!) so that they can develop an API platform for further branching this technology out! They plan on making models specified for certain tasks, while leaving it all open source so that we can modify it ourselves! This is kind of an important step, plus it'll be nice to be able to calibrate the thing for different spectrums. I've been watching the progress and I'm pretty confident they will make it by the 5th.

As for how the contraption actually works, there is an excellent description here. Every substance absorbs the different wavelengths of light at varying rates. You're basically just using the stripped DVD as a prism to split these wavelengths up in order to identify which were absorbed by the substance. By comparing results from similar samples (and subtracting the background light) you can get a kind of identifier for a given compound, which can then be used to find the substance in subsequent samples. The only hard part is going to be acquiring and confirming samples, but hopefully we can solve this with crowdsourcing! I think a good place to start would be analyzing the spectra of common cutting agents (plus excipients/solvents/contaminants/reagents/precursors that are known to be harmful, maybe heavy metals?). Once we've got all the major ones uploaded we should move onto RC's and the illicits, although any progress will be appreciated and order isn't important!
 
Wow, might have known someone would beat me to it. I saw this on kickstarter today & my first thought was 'can i use this to test my drugs'.
I thought bluelight'd be the best place to ask if this spectrometer could be easily used for this purpose. If it can then all that's needed is to build a reference sample of color spectra for different drugs - just like has been done for reagent test results.

Anyone with knowledge of spectrometer machines able to weigh in on this?
 
Let me put it this way: how many professional labs use a non-IR spectrophotometer to analyze drug samples? It's dirt cheap to do compared to for example GC/MS.

"400-900 nanometer range and 3-10 nm resolution." You'd better invest your money in a marquis tbh.

This seems like a really cool thing when it comes to education though, could be an awesome aid when teaching chemistry to high schoolers for example.
 
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