{"id":866777,"date":"2026-10-01T06:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T06:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/866777\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T06:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T06:52:11","slug":"open-source-tricorder-is-in-it-for-the-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/866777\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source Tricorder Is In It For The Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re reading Hackaday there\u2019s pretty good odds you\u2019re at least somewhat fond of Star Trek.\u00a0We\u2019d bet good money most of you would quit your jobs today if a Starfleet recruiter showed up. That\u2019s something you\u2019d have in common with [PeterAJansen], who has been working for over a decade now to create something worthy of being called a tricorder. If his latest iteration, the Open Source Science Tricorder Cyberdeck<\/a>, isn\u2019t there yet, it\u2019s pretty darn close.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Frankly, it looks more usable than Roddenberry\u2019s version.<\/p>\n

The \u201ctri\u201d in tricorder means three, but this device has more than three instruments\u2013 so did the ones on the show, come to think of it. You won\u2019t be scanning for veteron radiation with this, but you do get a scintillation crystal to get a spectroscopic analysis of beta- or gamma-ray sources; there\u2019s also a visible light spectrometer, thermal camera, and magnetic field camera along with a standard magnetometer and the usual environmental sensors to give you temperature, pressure, and humidity, plus particulate, VOC and CO2 concentration. Enough to explore an alien planet? That\u2019s hard to say, but it seems like enough to explore this one.<\/p>\n

The device is based around a Clockwork Pi uConsole, which takes care of the form-factor: a slabtop with a QWERTY keyboard and an IPS display in a nice screen, and a Compute Module 5 to crunch all that data. It might not be quite as stylish as the folding units seen on-screen in Star Trek, but it seems like an eminently practical form factor. There are videos of it in operation as well as being assembled on the GitHub repository,\u00a0 <\/a>where you can get all the details needed to make your own. It is the Open Source Science Tricorder, after all.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first project<\/a> we\u2019ve seen chasing tricorder glory, but many of the others<\/a> were more interested in screen accuracy<\/a> than science. [Peter]\u2019s earlier \u201carducorder\u201d<\/a> was a very notable exception to that trend.<\/p>\n

Thanks to [MarcCote] for the tip! If your scanners pick up something interesting in cyberspace, remember our hailing frequencies are always open.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re reading Hackaday there\u2019s pretty good odds you\u2019re at least somewhat fond of Star Trek.\u00a0We\u2019d bet good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":866778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-866777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/866778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}