π-LAB: A portable laboratory
Raspberry Pi becomes a portable analytical tool! Determine olive oil quality/adulteration or analyze other liquid foods
Story
π-LAB was born out of pure scientific curiosity. Two years ago, a group of friends (scientists and engineers) debated over the quality of the olive oil they produced and -naturally- everyone had a strong argument on why their olive oil was better. The question that came up was the following: Could there be a relatively low-cost method to determine -quantitatively- the quality of products we produce or use daily in our kitchen (olive oil, coffee, wine, honey, etc.)? Polymerase chain reaction equipment, or Raman spectrometers are not commonly found in our kitchens (unfortunately)...
π-LAB started its development a few weeks later and, fast forward today, 2 years later, it has become a small 'pocket lab', that can identify different grades of olive oil quality / or adulteration and can be used to perform similar analyses for a plethora of other liquid foods, like honey or coffee. Let's dig into the details and explain what it is and what it can (and can't) do...
WHAT IS IT...
π-LAB, as its name suggests, is a portable laboratory. It uses a novel optical-filter-on-CMOS spectrometer in combination with a laser, broadband light sources, a camera and the processing power offered by the Raspberry Pi single board computer (and a bit of Artificial Intelligence magic) in order to perform absorption, fluorescence and computer vision analyses of liquid food samples (and any liquid actually). The idea is the combination of several analytical techniques and smart post-processing to outweigh the lack of resolution inherent to low-cost equipment, in order to determine the quality of liquid foods with the best possible accuracy.
π-LAB is an open source project utilizing an extremely user friendly interface with powerful features. As the full code is open source, everyone can modify and upgrade to their liking the capabilities of the hardware, or test their own AI and control code. The hardware is graphically summarized in the figure below:
π-LAB is an open source project .... (read more....)
At the end just click for more: Kickstarter π-LAB: A portable laboratory
😎 What the others said for us:
Biggercake: π-LAB A portable laboratory ✌
Kickintrends: π-LAB A portable laboratory 👌
"The upcoming project would allow the Raspberry Pi to become a mobile laboratory device that can analyze and determine certain measurements of liquids like the quality and adulteration of olive oil."
Notebookcheck: π-LAB A portable laboratory check !!!!✔