Scientific-grade lasers are incredibly costly components of modern microscopes. Inexpensive laser diodes are much cheaper, often less than $100, but they have high divergence and an asymmetrical intensity profile, which makes them difficult to efficiently couple into single-mode optical fibers. Instead, they are coupled into multimode fibers, which results in the appearance of laser speckles […]
Reddress Sunday – Upcoming Changes to the Website
Happy Sunday Everyone! It’s been almost a year since we’ve written our last Reddress Sunday, the LabOnTheCheap errata. Originally we anticipated that we would have to publish corrections to previous posts on at least a monthly basis, but there haven’t been many emails telling us of scientific errors. Minor fixes include some small adjustments to […]
A step-by-step guide to building a prism-type TIRF microscope
Total Internal Reflection Florescence (TIRF) Microscopy is a technique used to observe a very thin region of sample directly at the surface of an interface (coverslip) without obtaining background interference from the rest of the sample volume. Dalton Gibbs, Anisa Kaur, Anoja Megalathan, Kumar Sapkota, and Soma Dhakal have published a wonderful paper entitled “Build Your Own Microscope: Step-By-Step […]
ManufacturingReports.com Helpful reviews of PCB manufacturers
On this website, at least 20 of the Do-It-Yourself pieces of research equipment that we have covered involve Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). We once suggested using EasyEDA to design and order these components, and were told over time that we were wrong, and that you should download KiCAD and use that instead. But this is […]
More DIY Optical Shutters
Several months ago we wrote a short write up about making a cheap optical shutter out of a hard drive disk controlled via Arduino. Since then we have had two Uniblitz shutters fail. We have now seen 6 Uniblitz shutters seen fail relatively quickly, with different users and different use conditions, over three labs. Even […]