FreeCAD News

It’s always fab­u­lous to see open hard­ware, even more won­der­ful when the tool chain to make the hard­ware is open, and last­ly, great when peo­ple have used FreeCAD as part of their fas­ci­nat­ing projects. 

The Open Col­orime­ter from IO Rodeo is a device allow­ing for the mea­sure­ment of the inten­si­ty of col­or in a giv­en sam­ple. It achieves this by mea­sur­ing the absorbance of light of a known wave­length as it’s passed through a sam­ple in a con­tain­er called a cuvette. These tech­niques can be used for a wide vari­ety of sci­ence and just glanc­ing at some of the tuto­ri­als on the IO ROdeo site we can see it has many research applications.

• Mea­sur­ing ammo­nia, nitrate or nitrite with API test kits
• Tur­bid­i­ty measurements
• Com­mu­ni­ty-devel­oped lab for mea­sur­ing active car­bon in soil
• Com­mu­ni­ty-devel­oped lab for mea­sur­ing proteins

It’s a real­ly capa­ble and neat design and uses an exist­ing prod­uct, the Adafruit PyBadge which is pre pro­grammed with a cus­tom firmware in Cir­cuit­python. Attached to this is an Adafruit Light sen­sor and you can choose a spe­cif­ic wave­length val­ue of LED mod­ule as a light source. It’s all neat­ly wrapped up in a 3D print­ed enclo­sure, of course mod­elled in FreeCAD. 

IO Rodeo sell the devices as com­plete pre­flashed sys­tems but glanc­ing over the repo every bit of the source is their for you to build one you­self should you need too. As it requires no lap­top and is a total­ly stand­alone device we imag­ine it’s incred­i­bly use­ful not only in edu­ca­tion but also out in the field. Round­ed out with OSHWA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion it’s a fan­tas­tic project and we wish them well.