In the fanciful land of scientific suppliers, a temperature controlled water bath can run you hundreds to upwards of a thousand dollars. These devices are not particularly accurate in their temperature read out, and… you know what we could complain about these buckets of filth for paragraphs, but let’s just provide you with an alternative. […]
Low-cost Rapid Prototyping of Flexible Microfluidic Devices
The LabOnTheCheap blog came about as a result of explaining to various groups that we made microfluidic chambers using parafilm with a $150 knife printer , and then sealed the microfluidic device with UV glue cured by a $10 UV nail dryer. With this website, all I have to do is send someone the link […]
ElectroPen: An ultralow-cost piezoelectric electroporator
Electroporation is a powerful alternative to heat shock for delivering small molecules such as plasmids across cell membranes. By application of an electrical field netivetly charged DNA is forced into elector-competent cells by an electrohoresis-type effect. Electroporators can be expensive, generally over $2000, hence the popularity of more chemical solutions such as heat shock. Enter […]
Pretty Good Focus
There is nothing worse than arriving in the morning to find that your overnight data acquisition drifted out of focus two hours in. However, commercial focus stabilization set ups only come on expensive and relatively recent microscopes. The coy-ly named Pretty Good Focus (pgFocus), is an open source hardware/software device for focus stabilization designed by Karl […]
Making a Solid State Cooling Block with PipetteJockey
We’d like to feature the work of PipetteJockey, and in this post we do that under the guise of a pseudo-tutorial they have posted on how to hack together a Solid State Cooling Block. The tutorial isn’t exactly detailed in the step-by-step, it makes the assumption that you already have a heat-sink block, and it’s up […]