A Detective Story
About to run the Final Qualifying Round for some second generation DIY Spectro, I placed the first blank into the cuvette holder, and pressed start (or rather ran python tryna.py; I’m tryna measure a spectrum, gosh!). The machine hummed into action, now that the motor control wire was plugged into slot 9, which the computer was communicating with rather than slot 2, which the computer was not.
A few minutes later I got the results: Nothing. The machine was not seeing any light. At all.
See, normally when I scan a blank sample, the detector (which has different sensitivities at different colors) shows a characteristic hill shape:
But when I ran this blank: Continue reading