Soil looks like one brown background, but water, minerals, organic matter, roots, fungi, bacteria, and decaying plant material all change how it reflects light. I will build a low-cost benchtop soil spectra scanner and use it to measure controlled soil samples across moisture, and texture. The output will be an open hardware recipe, calibration protocol, pilot dataset, and analysis notebooks that help hyperspectral biology researchers test faint biological signals against real soil backgrounds.