OpenFlexure Block Stage is a 3D printed flexure translation stage with sub-micron mechanical positioning. You can get the files to build it on GitHub. The project is 3-axis, short travel, high accuracy spinoff from the stage of the amazing OpenFlexure Microscope which we still haven’t covered, but we thought this stage deserved a post of its […]
Month: June 2019
Surplus Chemical Programs
At some universities, Chemical Surplus Programs provide an official channel to leave and take chemicals stocks. If your lab has a chemical that you aren’t going to use up, you donate it and save space. If your lab needs a chemical, you can check the surplus program before purchasing it and save some money. Below […]
Smartphone spectrophotometer for less than $6
We’ve covered smartphone florescence spectroscopy before, and we also have a post on building your own Lego spectrometer. In a similar vein check out a dedicated spectrophotometer detailed in a paper by Vasco Pereira and Bill Hosker. Maybe. The paper covers a 3D-printed version and teases a Lego constructed version. Either way, you have a […]
UV Transilluminators and Imaging on the Cheap
We’ve written about Gel Electrophoresis before, the punchline of which was that MiniPCR has good gel electrophoresis and imaging system for just $350. However, that system is for blue light. If you are trying to image faint bands of DNA stained with ethidium bromide you need a light source on the low end of 300 […]
OptiJ: Open-source optical projection tomography for $3000
Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) is a microscopy technique suited to mostly transparent specimens of ~10 mm. OPT requires the collection of a number of images (projections) of a sample taken from different angles. In practice, this means as rotating a sample around an axis in a precise manner. These images can be fed into mathematical […]