Michelson Interferometer

thingiverse

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 sources. You can see my video of it here : https://youtu.be/Cea9mbSiblM