The use of Arduino as a didactic tool: An approach in the detection of adulterated mezcal
Mezcal is an alcoholic beverage and is frequently adulterated, causing health problems in the population. Therefore, adulteration of alcoholic beverages is an illegal practice. In addition, equipment to detect adulterated beverages is becoming more expensive, making it inaccessible to most university laboratories interested in testing adulterated alcoholic beverages. In an attempt to solve the problem of identifying adulterated mezcal and avoiding the high cost of laboratory equipment, the objective of this work is to implement a homemade spectrophotometer through a simple methodology, to later identify samples of adulterated mezcal. This work tries to encourage teachers without deep knowledge in electronics and programming, to develop their own laboratory equipment, avoiding paying the high costs of commercial equipment. The Arduino-based home-made spectrophotometer is portable and the degree of detection is comparable to that of commercial equipment. In addition, the programming code for the user control interface is explained in detail. As a result of this work, it was found that the degree of detection of the proposed spectrophotometer is comparable with commercial equipment. Furthermore, the total cost was $100, which is extremely inexpensive compared to the high cost of commercial equipment. Finally, the response of the Arduino-based spectrophotometer is adequate to identify adulterated mezcal samples.
Keywords: Arduino, Spectrophotometry, Learning Electronics and Lab equipment.
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