We report upon the exploitation of the latest 3D printing technologies to provide low-cost
instrumentation solutions, for use in an undergraduate level final-year project. The project
addresses prescient research issues in optoelectronics, which would otherwise be inaccessible to
such undergraduate student projects. The experimental use of an integrating sphere in conjunction
with a desktop spectrometer presents opportunities to use easily handled, low cost materials as a
means to illustrate many areas of physics such as spectroscopy, lasers, optics, simple circuits,
black body radiation and data gathering. Presented here is a 3rd year undergraduate physics project
which developed a low cost (£25) method to manufacture an experimentally accurate integrating sphere
by 3D printing. Details are given of both a homemade internal reflectance coating formulated from
readily available materials, and a robust instrument calibration method using a tungsten bulb. The
instrument is demonst…