Open Source Tricorder Is In It For The Science

If you’re studying Hackaday there’s fairly good odds you’re at the very least considerably keen on Star Trek. We’d wager good cash most of you’ll give up your jobs right this moment if a Starfleet recruiter confirmed up. That’s one thing you’d have in widespread with [PeterAJansen], who has been working for over a decade now to create one thing worthy of being referred to as a tricorder. If his newest iteration, the Open Source Science Tricorder Cyberdeck, isn’t there but, it’s fairly darn shut.

The “tri” in tricorder means three, however this machine has greater than three devices– so did those on the present, come to consider it. You gained’t be scanning for veteron radiation with this, however you do get a scintillation crystal to get a spectroscopic evaluation of beta- or gamma-ray sources; there’s additionally a visual mild spectrometer, thermal digital camera, and magnetic area digital camera together with an ordinary magnetometer and the standard environmental sensors to provide you temperature, strain, and humidity, plus particulate, VOC and CO2 focus. Enough to discover an alien planet? That’s exhausting to say, but it surely looks like sufficient to discover this one.

The machine relies round a Clockwork Pi uConsole, which takes care of the form-factor: a slabtop with a QWERTY keyboard and an IPS show in a pleasant display, and a Compute Module 5 to crunch all that information. It may not be fairly as fashionable because the folding items seen on-screen in Star Trek, but it surely looks like an eminently sensible kind issue. There are movies of it in operation in addition to being assembled on the GitHub repository,  the place you may get all the main points wanted to make your individual. It is the Open Source Science Tricorder, in spite of everything.

This isn’t the first project we’ve seen chasing tricorder glory, however many of the others had been extra in screen accuracy than science. [Peter]’s earlier “arducorder” was a really notable exception to that development.

Thanks to [MarcCote] for the tip! If your scanners decide up one thing fascinating in our on-line world, keep in mind our hailing frequencies are always open.