After some months in sleeping mode, I finally got hold of a brand new Ocean Optics Flame VIS-NIR-ES spectrometer. 

I also bought a fibre, a collimating lens and a cosine corrector for absolute irradiance measurements. But we still need a calibrated light source if we want to measure irradiance precisely. I will have to wait for few months, as the light source is as expensive as the spectrometer. 

You can see the optic fibre with the cosine corrector in place and the blue and red lights on. The graph with the reading is below. The intensity is not calibrated, but I also have a very useful spectral panel that I originally purchased for the box. 

I have also ordered a new long pass filter for the camera, as I have realised there is no signal beyond 700nm with any of the light sources and the filter (which I might not need in the end). But I also discovered that the MidOpt filter lets a lot of light in (thanks to my new toy!).

As you can see from above, there is plenty of light coming through before 700nm, which will hopefully change with the new bandpass filter. 

Once the filter arrives, I will start taking measurements from different plants, but we will still need the calibrated light source to finally start making precise measurements that will enable us to calculate the fluorescence parameters.