This is a complete Michelson Interferometer based on the design of ordaos on thingiverse and completely hacked to fit my needs and expectations. It uses precut OpenBEAM extrusions for structure and custom 3D printed parts for mounting the optics. In this project, I used a He-Ne laser as the light source for the best results regarding interference patterns. It also works with a cheap 2$ laser pointer but the beam shape is really ugly so it's harder to align. A PIN photodiode with on-chip amplification is used to provide a fast active acquisition of the signal with a digital scope. I added a motor-mount built with scraped CD-drive parts to move one of the mirror in the beam axis, trying to make spectroscopy using the device. So far I couldn't get anything more than the speed and relative position of the mirror by counting fringes with the scope. By using a better way to acquire the signal we could use the He-Ne laser as a calibration and measure the spectrum of other light sour
Details
This is the video I've made for my YouTube channel. It's in french but I'll add English captions soon and provide more info here on how to build it.
Its based on self mixing topology as opposed to the classical Michelson appoach which would allow smaller volume occupied by the setup as opposed to a lab setup.
I can see you connected your photodiode to the mic input of your soundcard. Is this right? Did you use a transimpedance amp in between the soundcard and the photodiode by any chance?
Hi! Thanks for sharing your project, I'll follow it! Yes it's right, I connected my photodiode directly to the mic input of my sound card. I didn't use a transimpedence amp because there is already a pretty good one in the chip of the photodiode (preamp) http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/201061866496?ssPageName=ADME:L:OC:CA:3160 . I was just too lazy to build my own high-frequency amplification circuit, and it lets you connect a scope probe directly on it which reduces noise exposure (and the voltage is in the range of 0-500mV which is ok to plug directly in a sound card too)
Hey very interesting project. I am curious to know about the detector used. The link given above is broken. Can you tell more about detector? @Frédérik Berthiaume
@mullermuttu It's a PIN photodiode with preamp from Hamamatsu, S6468 series https://docs.rs-online.com/fbe9/0900766b80870611.pdf