DIY Instrument Making: How to build in-house spectrometers and analytical devices

CHEM 520 strips analytical instruments down to their building blocks and asks you to put them back together yourself, so that a spectrometer or pH sensor stops being a black box and becomes something you can design, debug, and trust. You'll spend the semester moving between op-amp circuits, ADC sampling, digital filtering, and optics — first on paper and homework sets, then in hands-on builds that culminate in a working prototype project, with a midterm and final anchoring the theory. The payoff is leverage for interdisciplinary research: once you know what's actually happening inside commercial gear, you can build cheaper, more specialized versions when your lab work demands something off-catalog.