1. Drill a hole in the center of one of the ABS caps.  This will now be referred to as the front cap.  
   1. Use a 0.0217” drill bit and try to put the hole as close to vertical at the exact center as possible.  Be aware that the drill bit is very fragile.  
   2. Use a 0.0276” drill bit by hand to make the hole a bit bigger.
   3. The completed part is shown in the picture below at left with the location of the hole indicated by the red arrow.
2. Drill a hole at the end of the other ABS cap.  This will now be referred to as the back cap.  
   1. Use a 3/8” end mill bit to drill a hole 0.75” deep moved in 0.10” from the outside wall the cap.
   2. The completed part is shown in the picture below at right.
3. Prepare the PVC tube.
   1. Use a saw to cut a piece of 1½ inch PVC conduit to a length of 11¼”.  (This lets one sheet of paper sit in the tube without bumping.)  Smooth the ends of the cut if desired.
   2. Clamp the tube into an end mill, load the 1/8” end mill bit and follow this recipe:
      1. Move to the left end and zero the y-axis.
      2. Move in 1.3”, find the center by just touching the top.  Zero x and z at that point.
      3. Drill all the way through and then go 0.15” in each direction in x.
      4. Move up to -0.07” in z, and right to 1.33” in y.
      5. Repeat the 0.15” in each direction in x. 

1. Start the SpectraCam program and point the spectrometer at a fluorescent light.
2. Click the “Start” button to begin capturing data and once again to end capturing data and hold the last data.  You also can use CTRL + Space Bar to toggle the camera.  You should see a picture similar to the one below.  If a warning message about the camera not being found appears, change the “Camera #” from 0 to 1.
3. With the camera stopped, press the “Auto” button.  The two numbers in the “Blue” and “Red” boxes should change slightly.
4. Check the quality of the calibration by selecting “Fluorescent Light” from the dropdown box titled “Fit”.  This will add colored bars indicating the expected peak location to the line scan. Many of your peaks should line up with the bars.  (This calibration data is adapted from https://www.nist.gov/pml/handbook-basic-atomic-spectroscopic-data ).
   1. The first order lines are shown in red and the second order lines are shown in green. 
   2. You can adjust the “Blue” or “Red” numbers slightly to try to make the peaks line up better.
   3. The camera doesn’t show all the lines since it only has a range of 380 nm to 900 nm.
5. Once the camera is calibrated, these two numbers should be entered for each set of data.
   1. The calibration data scan be saved to the local computer by using the the “Save Calibration” entry from the menu accessed by left-clicking on the upper-left icon.
   2. Moving the camera to another computer will require the numbers to be entered by hand but will not require another spectra of the overhead lines to be taken.
6. The “Brightness” dropdown box can be used for dim samples.
7. Data Saving.
   1. The data can be saved using the “Save As” entry from the menu accessed by left-clicking on the upper-left icon.  This data can be loaded back into the SpectraCam software and modified.
   2. The data can also be exported as columns of numbers from that same menu.  Once it is in that format, it cannot be loaded back into SpectraCam.
   3. Also from that menu, the view on the screen can be saved to a PNG file.  The resulting file cannot be loaded back into the program.

Once the SpectraCam is completed, it is time to use it and measure things.  The most obvious sample is the fluorescent light that was used for calibration.  In the picture below, the red and green lines are the expected values for the first and second order lines.