It’s field dependent, but nowadays a lot of papers will have preprints on the arXiv or bioRxiv. So if your looking for a paper and Google Scholar keeps sending you to journals behind pay walls, see if these preprint servers have a pre-print of the same paper.
Month: May 2018
A User-Friendly, Low-Cost Turbidostat
For various experimental applications, microbial cultures at defined, constant densities are highly advantageous over simple batch cultures. That’s where a turbidostat comes in, which keeps a culture at a constant turbidity. Here’s a paper by Stefan Hoffmann, Christian Wohltat, Kristian Müller and Katja Arndt where they present a 3D printed small-scale turbidostat for under half a […]
Low Cost Laser Cutters
With up to 4 watts of laser power, the Emblaser is comes as a kit for as low as $650. For five times the cost, and with ten times the power, you can get a “hobby series” laser cutter from Full Spectrum Laser. Of course consider if you really need or want a laser cutter, […]
A Cheap Laser Shutter Using a Hard Drive Disk
An anonymous contributor wrote in about making laser shutters using hard disk drive rotary voice-coil actuators. The contributor’s lab has made a couple of these which are controlled via an Arduino, at a much lower cost than shutters from Thorlabs or similar. Another paper of a similar vein, by W. Bowden, R. Hill, G. Baird, and P. […]
Cheap and DIY Spectrometers
The general base line solution to spectrometers is Ocean Optics. While bare bones and well known, it’s by no means cheap and the software is propriatary. Consider the Spectruino, at only half a grand and with open source software. Have you tried the Spectruino? We’d love to know your thoughts. The cheapest solution we know […]