Abstract. The SPectrometer for Ice Nuclei (SPIN) is a commercially available ice nuclei counter manufactured by Droplet Measurement Technologies in Boulder, CO. The SPIN is a continuous flow diffusion chamber with parallel plate geometry based on the Zurich Ice Nucleation Chamber and the Portable Ice Nucleation Chamber. This study characterizes and describes the behavior of the SPIN chamber, reports data from laboratory measurements, and quantifies uncertainties associated with the measurements. A machine learning approach for analyzing depolarization data from the SPIN Optical Particle Counter is also presented. Experiments with ammonium sulfate are used to investigate homogeneous freezing and droplet breakthrough, experiments with kaolinite, NX illite, and silver iodide are used to investigate heterogeneous ice nucleation, and results are compared to those from the literature. Overall, we report that the SPIN is able to reproduce previous CFDC ice nucleation measurements.