Anyone who needs a sensor to measure the light intensity is looking for an optical power-meter. Devices with a freely positionable sensor head are quite expensive and make experiments on "Malus' Law", Fresnel's formulae or others, where a relative power measurement is absolutely sufficient, more difficult. For this purpose we developed 'PowerCam', where the webcam becomes a simple power meter!
Our software includes:
- The use of a webcam or C-mount camera (UVC standard) as a "power-meter" for simple experiments
- The uncalibrated measurement of intensity changes on the image sensor
- Simple reading of the intensity value, both graphically and quantitatively as a value
- Live visualisation of the sensor to avoid clipping
- Saturation warning when the sensor is overloaded and automatic adjustment of sensitivity