Potatoes are China’s fourth major food crop. With the government’s continuous emphasis on potato production and sales and the strategy of potato staple foods, its market share has also increased year by year. However, the quality of potatoes varies from place to place and even in the same region, which has a serious impact. The development of the potato industry. Therefore, realizing rapid non-destructive testing of potato quality has important practical significance for developing the potato staple food industry. This paper aims to develop a low-cost non-destructive rapid detection device for the potato quality. The successive projections algorithm (SPA) is used to analyze the distribution of characteristic wavelengths of potato processing quality in a spectrometer environment. According to the model results in the preprocessing state of the standard normal variate transformation (SNV), a selection of 7 bands (700, 750, 800, 850, 900, 950 and 1 000 nm) is selected. Based on the potato’s special epidermal characteristics and internal texture uniformity, a handheld potato multi-quality visible/near infrared local diffuse transmission detection device is designed, including a light source module, a spectrum acquisition module, a control module, and a power supply. Module, display module, the size of the whole device is 140 mm×80 mm×70 mm, and the weight is 340 g. A potato multi-quality partial least squares prediction model was established using the research and development equipment. The root means square error of the potato dry matter and starch content prediction model verification sets were 1.05% and 1.02%, respectively. At the same time, based on the development tools of QT, the real-time analysis equipment control software was written in C language, which realized the one-click real-time non-destructive inspection of the internal quality of potatoes. Finally, the testing stability and accuracy of the R&D device were tested and verified. The results show that the developed handheld potato multi-quality sensor detection device can meet the needs of on-site real-time detection and provide technical support for developing the potato staple food industry.