ASI290MM Mini Spectrometer

I needed a spectrometer rather urgently to measure the spectra of an existing light source and a variety of LEDs to replace that light source. I didn't want to spend a fortune one a professional instrument and found a bunch of instructions for building a spectrometer using diffraction gratings. I ordered a couple of diffraction gratings (which cost less than a coffee) and was playing around with a simple webcam, but that didn't really give very good results, mostly due to being a color camera. Then I realized that I had my little monochrome guiding camera for astrophotography, and it's sensor is several orders of magnitude better than the one in the webcam. With a couple of accessories (mainly a CCTV zoom lens), I quickly had a working prototype and all that was left was to build a proper case that can be easily disassembled in order to remove the camera when it's needed for astrophotography.

The OpenSCAD code here isn't pretty by any means, but I wanted to at least share it for now