As that "enterprising kid" who couldn't wait until the SCiO was completed, and who was fed up with his 3d printed visible light spectroscope, I put in a lot of research effort figuring out how to go about creating a portable, financially attainable NIR spectroscope. I started out thinking it would be fairly straightforward since I already worked on creating CCD sensor driver boards in my early highschool years (after all it just seemed like you'd need a linear CCD with no IR-cut filter, a diffraction grating, a prism with 95%+ reflectivity, and an IR emitter with a peak wavelength of ~920nm). I invested about 6 months working through the various roadblocks I encountered until I managed to get half-decent results from it when taking the spectrum of various salts. Still never managed to fully refine it since I didn't have the budget to (Heck the Eagle schematics I sent off to a PCB fabricator were so poorly-designed that in order to get it to work correctly it required me to solder a wire across two traces to prevent the sensor from blowing up). It's still somewhere in one of my drawers and is a fun novelty item (and it did win (second?) place at my junior science fair) but at least with my design, it really wasn't the portable tricorder I was hoping for...