Public Lab wants to make pollution detection cheap and easy for anyone to accomplish. Their work goes back to the BP oil spill and the efforts being made on behalf of the gulf coast. The team felt that without large scale lab testing it was easy to BP to deny responsibility and proof of contamination fell on the residents.
Their solution is the Homebrew Oil Testing Kit. Using a UV laser, a piece of dvd for refraction and a webcam the device fits together precisely to shine a light through a narrow slit and act as a fluorescent spectrometer. The kit is currently part of a Kickstarter campaign to generate prototype test kits.
Homebrew Oil Testing Kit works as an open source do-it-yourself unit, hoping to identify any kind of oil pollution. The sample is dissolved in mineral oil and then acted upon by the UV laser. The glow from the laser is diffracted through the dvd and moves into the spectrometer. The webcam uses open source software to process the information and compare the sample against known pollutants.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publiclab/the-homebrew-oil-testing-kit
Thousands of members work with the public lab to enter their data and input their spectrometer readings. The user generated data helps to continually build and refine the database of pollutants. This new pollution initiative builds on Public Lab’s 2012 Kickstarter project, the open source spectrometer.
Public Lab is doing incredible work to bring positive change to the world, and they’re doing it with a maker spirit and a great open source philosophy. The Kickstarter campaign video manages to be informative, concise and entertaining while discussing the project. The video feels more like a Wes Anderson movie than a plea to join an open source pollution initiative.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publiclab/the-homebrew-oil-testing-kit