High-tech: Converts your cellphone into a spectrometer

The project aims for help to investigate chemical spills, diagnose crop diseases, identify contaminants in household products, and even analyze olive oil, coffee, and homebrew beer.

This open hardware kit costs only $35, but has a range of more than 400-900 nanometers, and a resolution of as high as 3 nm.

Public Lab as an open community also created open source software (spectralworkbench.org) to collect, analyze, compare, and share calibrated spectral data.