A portable nondestructive measuring instrument for plant chlorophyll was developed, which can perform real-time, quick and nondestructive measurement of chlorophyll. The instrument is mainly composed of four parts, including leaves clamp, driving circuit of light source, photoelectric detection and signal conditioning circuit and micro-control system. A new scheme of light source driving was proposed, which can not only achieve constant current, but also control the current by digital signal. The driving current can be changed depending on different light source and measurement situation by actual operation, which resolves the matching problem of output intensity of light source and input range of photoelectric detector. In addition, an integrative leaves clamp was designed, which simplified the optical structure, enhanced the stability of apparatus, decreased the loss of incident light and improved the signal-to-noise ratio and precision. The photoelectric detection and signal conditioning circuit achieve the conversion between optical signal and electrical signal, and make the electrical signal meet the requirement of AD conversion, and the photo detector is S1133-14 of Hamamatsu Company, with a high detection precision. The micro-control system mainly achieves control function, dealing with data, data storage and so on. As the most important component, microprocessor MSP430F149 of TI Company has many advantages, such as high processing speed, low power, high stability and so on. And it has an in-built 12 bit AD converter, so the data-acquisition circuit is simpler. MSP430F149 is suitable for portable instrument. In the calibration experiment of the instrument, the standard value was measured by chlorophyll meter SPAD-502, multiple linear calibration models were built, and the instrument performance was evaluated. The correlation coefficient between chlorophyll prediction value and standard value is 0. 97, and the root mean square error of prediction is about 1.3 SPAD. In the evaluation experiment of the instrument repeatability, the root mean square error is 0. 1 SPAD. Results of the calibration experiment show that the instrument has high measuring precision and high stability.