Product Video: Lab Spectroradiometer

Hello my name is Schuyler Smith and I do technical sales and support here at Apogee Instruments. And today we’re going to talk about the Lab Spectroradiometers - our PS-100, PS-200, and PS-300 units. Before I get into the overview, I know a lot of people do troubleshooting watching these videos. So I just wanted to point out how to get to our support page. And so you click on “support” up in the corner from www.apogeeinstruments.com, and then you’ll click here on the icon that shows both our ver

sions of spectroradiometers, and that’s going to take you to our spectroradiometer page support. And so you’ll see you’ll be able to find the manuals there and the spec sheets, and I’m going to refer you back to this as well because we’re going to cover a lot of information fast in this video. And so if you have any questions that you need to go over again I’ll refer you back to the product manuals or the frequently asked questions (FAQs) I think are probably going to answer and address your que

stions. So, this video is going to cover the common applications of spectroradiometers, the differences between the models, setting up the instrument, demonstrating the software, and then just how to export that to excel sheets – exporting those graphs. So, what does a spectroradiometer do? Well, it gives you the intensity of light at each wavelength. So it gives you that curve so you know how much red, how much blue, how much green, there is in a light, and it’s graphing it for you. And so our

model allows you to take that intensity and then apply that to a unit of measurement. So you can see the amount of Photon flux and the amount of energy flux density readings. That’s PAR in µmol m⁻² s⁻¹ or Watts m². You can also do transmittance measurements and the reflectance measurements. And reflectance measurements are really cool. We have here this reference where it gives all these different things that you can look at as far as NDVI, PRI, Red edge NDVI (rNDVI). Once you know the intensiti

es at these wavelengths, you can use these various formulas to get your chlorophyll content, your carotenoids, and all these other things that these studies show. And so we have that reference there, and it’s also below in the comments. And you can email us as well if you’re curious about this particular page. So, PS-100. PS-200. PS-300. What is the difference? Well, it really comes down to range and wavelength resolution. So we can see we have our sensitivity across the first row here: the PS-1

00 350 to 1150 nm, the PS-200 190 to 850 nm, and the PS-300 220 to 1100 nm. So the visible light range that usually most of the time we’re concerned about with plants is 400 to 700 nm. So you can see any of these three will cover that range. But the difference is in the wavelength resolution. For one, the PS-200 has the finest resolution out of all of them. Whereas the PS-300 covers the highest calibrated range from 300 to 1000 nm. And then the wavelength resolution on the PS-100 is great, it ha

s 1 nm resolution, it just doesn’t go as far down into the UV as the PS-300 does. They all have the same detector type, but then the grating is a little bit different on the PS-200 and the PS-300—you can see it’s that same holographic aberration-corrected. And of course you're welcome to dig deeper into exactly what the holographic and aberration-corrected means. It just it helps you get that finer resolution. And they’re all 16-bit units. So, I’m going to put this up here as the written instruc

tions, and then we’re going to demonstrate this here in a little bit after we do the set up. But I just wanted to have this up here for troubleshooting if anyone is trying to get their unit going. The first two steps of every measurement: 1. Set the integration time. The integration time is like the shutter on a camera. It controls the amount of light hitting the detector. So, if there’s too much light it saturates the signal and it doesn’t allow you to get a correct reading, and if there’s too

little light then it doesn’t have enough light to clearly take the readings to see what you’re looking at. So, the way the integration time is set is in “View” and “Scope” mode. And you do have to sometimes play with that so that you get that integration time dialed in so that it’s maximized and correctly giving you the output. Once you have that integration time set, then it’s step two. But first, this is our example of integration times. We have here the integration time looking great. You can

see that it maximizes right there, whereas over here you can see it’s saturated. It flat lines across the top. So that means your integration time is too large – you need to bring it down. And that’s straight out of the manual there if you need another reference on that. Once we have the integration time, then we go to the dark scan. And the dark scan is done by simply taking the dark cap, putting it over the top of the detector here, and then we click the dark bulb here. And that essentially z

eros out the unit so that then it gives us a flat line. So once we do those two things, then we can actually have a useful reading. Alright, so let’s go ahead and cover the demonstration on how to look at the measurements as well as how to set it up. When the unit comes to you, you have the head, the cap, the fiber optic cable here, then you have the unit itself – the spectroradiometer unit—and the USB cable along with the base. So, when it comes you can go ahead and hook up the USB. You can scr

ew on the fiber optic to both sides. If yours doesn’t come with it in here, you can screw the top off here and screw on the fiber optic to the unit underneath here. And we’ll show that unscrewing that off here in a little bit when we do our reflectance demonstration. So, our unit is here. It’s set up. Now let’s talk about the software. It comes to you on a little USB jump drive, and so here is the information it comes with right here. There’s a couple ways to do this next step. The way I’m going

to show you is to take all that information on the USB jump drive and save it onto a folder onto our desktop. So right here I’ve just saved all the information right here onto my desktop. And then I’m going to run the install from this one as opposed to running it off the jump drive. It’s a little bit of a preference, but I find it works great. So once we’re here, we can now run the software. And we get to that… we’ll close out of our jump drive… let’s open it off of our desktop version. So we

know our desktop is saved on our C drive. “StellarNet Software 5.33” – we’ll double click on that. Go to “SWUpdate-Install” so we’ll click on that. It will ask if you want to run this, you say yes, and go through a few steps there. Now the software is installed on your C drive. Now the next step, once we have that one done, is we need to get the 64-bit driver installed. And the way you do that is you come back here to kind of the home screen here on our jump drive. We go to “SWDrivers 13” and th

en we have “SWDriver64.” And so we’re going to run this, and if we right click on it, and we want to “Run as administrator.” Get in the habit of right click “Run as administrator” it’s what makes the StellarNet Spectrowiz software work the best every time. So we right click “Run as administrator.” It’s going to say do you want to do this, you say yes. It’s going to come up with this screen. That’s exactly what we want. Everything is fine. So we hit okay. Now what that has done is it installed th

e install instructions onto the C drive. So if we come over… let’s open up another windows file explorer here – I just right clicked on that—and then I’m just going to come right up here to “File Explorer.” Open that up. And then I’m going to come down here to my “C” drive, “OS (C:)” drive. And then I’m going to look for one that says “SWDriver64” and it’s right here. So it’s in alphabetical order in mine. So once I open up this folder, it’s going to have these, which are the drivers, and it’s g

oing to say install it. Yes, I want to install this. So the way I do that is I right click “Run as administrator” and then when we run it say do you want to do this? We say yes. And then here it tells you the same thing “Run as administrator,” “Total attempted: 1,” “Number successfully imported: 0.” Mine says 0 because it’s already installed on mine. If yours says 0 it’s probably already installed, or you can see if there’s something wrong. But yours should say “1” of “1” and that means that it

was done correctly. Alright, and then you’ll also notice if it’s done correctly because then the USB down in the corner will start recognizing the device, and the green light will come on. And that’s how you know the 64-bit driver is installed. Next step of setup is getting the calibration files moved over, so let’s close this folder. And let’s go back to home on our jump drive here. And we have the “sw” “sw1.icf” folders. These are our two calibration folders/files right here. Those are our two

files. So we need to move those underneath the program files for StellarNet. So, again I’m going to come down here – there’s a couple methods to do this – but I will just go ahead and right click here, open up another file explorer, and I’m going to go to my C drive, and I’m going to go to “Program Files” – just plain “Program Files,” and then I’m going to go to “StellarNet.” And again it’s right up here is the directory if you’re looking for that. And then SpectraWiz. And this is the folder I

need to move these to. So I come back over to my “StellarNet Spec Jump Drive.” I have my files here. I’m just going to highlight them with “shift” and then we can copy them or you can drag and drop them. It says “Move to SpectraWiz” and that’s exactly what I want to do. So I just dragged and dropped them over here. And it says you need to provide this to move this folder, and I say sounds good, continue… continue. So move those two folders over to our program files “StellarNet.” So we are all se

t there. So now we’re set up and we’re actually ready to look at the software and open that up. There’s a couple ways to do this, but I like this method. I just find it here in my program file. It’s called “Swd.” I will right click on it and come to “Run as administrator.” So let’s do that. It says do you want to do this? And I say yes. So now it has our signal, the first thing we’ll notice is we do see the curve here, and we’re seeing light coming in. And I’m not going to go through each indivi

dual icon around here. There’s some important ones here – here’s that dark scan one we were looking at here a minute ago. But the important things we should recognize as we’re setting up here first is our value and our time because that’s our set integrator detector time here and our value just kind of shows us that it is seeing some counts. But before we go deep into that, let’s talk about initial set up. What we can look at. So, in our initial set up, we click the “Setup” up here and we have a

lot of information here, and again refer to the manual for a lot of it. “Detector integration time” we’re going to talk about that here in a minute. But before, just to make sure everything is set up correctly, let’s come down here to “Interface port and detector.” So let’s click there, and let’s just verify that everything is correct. “CCD 2048” if you remember from our spec sheet on the PowerPoint slide that is what all three of our units are. That is correct. “USB2-EPP cable” that is how we’

re connected. “LT16 Digitizer” correct. And “BLUE-Wave Spectro.” All of those are checked. So it automatically recognized that from plugging it in, so we’re set there. So we’ll exit that set up. We’ll come down here. The next thing we’re going to look at is “Unit calibration coefficients.” And it should’ve already recognized these units as well, but let’s just check. So we click on that. Now where do I find the calibration coefficients for my unit? They’re actually right on the bottom, and you’l

l see where it says “C1,” “C2,” “C3.” So right now it says “Select channel 1” and I hit “enter” and it’s going to give me a number that matches C1 exactly. I hit “enter” and C2 is going to match C2. And C3 is going to match C3. C4 is 0 because there is no fourth calibration unit. Alright, so we know that that is all set up. Now the other thing you may notice when you’re first setting it up is that you get a lot of warning messages. So you can turn that on and off right here in “Setup,” “Warning

message enable.” And so sometimes they’re helpful when you’re learning the unit to walk through but sometimes you find them just in the way. So you can turn those on and off as needed. So, let’s go through our first steps of each measurement. The first one is setting the integration time. We’ve got to get the integration time up to here. The first thing we can do is we can use this little slider, and we can slide this out. And we can see it jumped up there. And it changed our integration time to

852 down here. It doesn’t look like quite enough. I can maximize out our little bar here and it says 1000 ms. That’s not quite to the top here so our sliding bar isn’t going to get it done. So we come over here to “Setup,” “Detector integration time,” and let’s just type in 1500 to see if that is too high or if that’s right. So that’s pretty close. We’re closer. Let’s see if we can go a little bit higher. So let’s go “Setup,” “Detector integration time,” 1700, and again it takes a little bit of

experimenting so that you can get this. It pops up and then it always comes right back down. So that looks pretty good. We’re pretty close to the top without touching it. We don’t see a flat anywhere. Alright, so our next stage, now that we’ve set the integration time, is the dark scan. So we’ll want to take the cap. Put it on top of the unit so it looks like that. We see it drops down here, but we see a few little noise spots. So we click the dark scan… and then it drops to 0, and we saw the v

alue go to 0 as well. And that’s how we know it successfully took a dark scan. And it saved it. And then we open that up, and it pops up. A little bit smoother on a couple spots, but it is showing us what the light is that we’d expect. Now if we wanted to, you can do this drag and drop if you want to cut your wavelengths down. Like let’s say we’re only interested in 350 to, let’s say, just above 800 nm. Just by clicking on that, it just shortened the X range – our X values down here. If I want t

o get rid of that, I just hit the “X zoom info / Y zoom enable” right here. And boom I hit that, and it takes me all the way out to the full range of the unit. And again, I can just drag and drop that if I want to look at that a little bit closer and get that smaller wavelength range. So our next step is we want to see what this looks like in terms of a unit of measurement. In particular, µmol m⁻² s⁻¹. So let’s come up here to “View.” Let’s go to “Radiometer” mode. And we want “MicroMoles per sq

uare meter per second.” So I click on that, and again it’s going to give me this warning message. It’s like this isn’t what you were calibrated to. And I say I understand. I’m not under my calibration lights. I’m under the lights I changed it to. So I say “Yes” and it is now going to give me the intensity of each wavelength. Now yours might be much smaller than this. And the way we would change to see our graph on different levels is we would go to that “View,” “Y scale,” “set Max Y.” I’m guessi

ng most of yours is something probably like this set at 10 instead of 1. And so that’s 10 µmol m⁻² s⁻¹ over here. So we want to go to “View,” “Y scale,” “set Max Y” and let’s just go to 0.5 because it is [unintelligible] in here. And so then it gives us a better scale. So then, at this point, let’s save it. Or actually, we’re thinking to ourselves, you know maybe I’m curious about the intensity out here to 750 nm. Well if we wanted to change, the PAR range is set at 400 to 700 nm, but if I wante

d to see some of that far red and see the amount of µmol m⁻² s⁻¹ out here, I can go to “View,” and I go to “Radiometer” and I “Setup Range for Watt and Rflux measurement.” The first one’s 400. Well, we’ll leave that one that’s fine. Second one, let’s change that to 750. And now we’re going to see this value go up… 7.26. So we added about a quarter more of µmol m⁻² s⁻¹ to go all the way out here to 750 nm. So, we like what we’re looking at. Let’s go ahead and save this sample. So we go to “File,”

“Save,” “Sample.” And we’re just saving it to the desktop for our example right here. So we will save it as “light sample.” And we want to save it as a .IRR file. So we save that. And again, you can change this. It’s different than what your zoom mode is. This is actually setting the export parameters. But for ours we’ll just set it at 350. I like to do wavelength increment of 1. And then it did take it all the way out there to the max of 1100… Now that we have those samples saved, let’s just s

how a quick tool on how to look at these graphs in spreadsheets or in Excel so we can see how they graph out. What we’ll go ahead and do is we’ll just open up a blank Excel here – you can see I have a blank Excel opened here. And we’re just going to drag, let’s look at the light sample spectrum. So we’re just going to drag this over and drop it right there. It opens up in a new window, but that’s fine. We’re just doing a quick analysis here. So we’re going to click on “DATA” because we need to g

et this to text to columns. But first, we need to highlight it. So we highlight column A. “Text to Columns.” “Delimited” – that’s correct we can already see down here our data. Our nanometer wavelength here and then our intensity in terms of µmol m⁻² s⁻¹. So we hit “Next.” Yes, we want those in separate columns. We hit “Finish.” And then for fun let’s rename this nm here, and let’s rename this µmol. Then I’m going to hit (Ctrl + ↓); it takes me to the bottom. Then I’m going to hit (Shift + →). (

Ctrl + Shift + ↑). You see it comes with this nice little “Quick Analysis” tool. I will click on that. I’m going to click on “CHARTS.” And then I’m going to do “Line.” And there we go. We just have a very quick analysis, but we can see we can now analyze it using Excel. So with that, that concludes our video today. I hope you learned something. Let me know if you have any questions. That’s our contact information there. And be sure to hit that subscribe to watch more of our Tech Support videos.

Thank you very much.