The FAST Pump is an elegant, low cost, small, and easy to fabricate alternative to commercial peristaltic pumps which will cost you between $140 to $400 depending on quality and DIY considerations. Detailed instructions on how to make the device are covered in this paper by Alexander Jönsson, Arianna Toppi, and Martin Dufva .
Lab On The Cheap covers a lot of microfluidic pumps. We’ve covered syringe-based pumps, and even a pneumatic pump, but the FAST pump is the first peristaltic pump design to make it onto this website. A peristaltic pump works by pinching and rolling a tube of liquid. This results in pulsed liquid dispersal from a reservoir, with the pulse volume determined by the space between pinches.
The design of this pump relies on a 3D Stereolithography printer such as the Form 3 and the paper starts off with an interesting discussion on the limitations of various 3D printing technologies. If you don’t have a 3D Stereolithography printer, there are a lot of other designs out there, and you can follow this paper’s citations to view many many other designs.
The paper includes all the instructions necessary to build the project, including a bill of materials, links to the osf.io hosted CAD and STL files, and lots and lots of pretty pictures showing the assembly of a fairly elegant device.