iPad Oscilloscope
Posted in Hardware
To revisit an earlier post on mini-oscilloscopes, how about an iPad oscilloscope?
It’s not available just yet, but Oscium will soon start selling the iMSO-104, a peripheral add-on for the iPad, iPhone,…
Category: Hardware
Mini oscilloscopes
Posted in Hardware
Seeed Studio repurposed parts for cheap MP3 players and made a production miniature oscilloscope, the DSO nano. I like this small tool and bought one of the first iterations (see…
OpenOptogenetics
When Karl Deisseroth started publishing his work on Channelrhodopsin-2, he set up a website to share the resources, including plasmid information, protocols for expression systems, and hardware details. His site, optogenetics.org, is…
Repurposing audio recording products
Posted in Hardware
Scientific research equipment is expensive. Partly because the markets are often small, so product development budgets and manufacturing set up costs have to be split over a comparatively small number of units. In addition, the customers are typically more concerned about reliability and service, rather than price.
However, there are other markets where these issues are…
Reality check for the Octavius-2P laser
Posted in Hardware
Lasers for 2-photon microscopy are special in that they deliver all of their photons in a short period of time. Take a standard Ti:Sapph with an 80 MHz pulse rate and 100 fs pulses….
Fluorescence retrofit
Posted in Hardware
This is a cute little product that lets you retrofit a standard microscope for fluorescence. It contains an LED light source, dichroic, and filters. It may be clumsy to have this big blue cannon…
Open source orbital shaker
Posted in Hardware
This is a nicely done (and award-winning) orbital shaker. Orbital shakers can often cost on the order of $1500. This one can be custom built for about $150, with additional units costing about $60 (a single controller and power…
Pulsed laser power
Someone asked me recently how peak power related to average power for pulsed lasers. You can get fancy with this calculation, but people rarely do. 99% of the time,…
Labrigger Xmas Gift List 2010
Here’s the 2010 Labrigger Xmas Gift List.
Care to add anything?
Beam profiler
Measure the divergence of your laser beam, its stability, uniformity– all kinds of good stuff. These are useful metrics for diagnosing problems with the laser and really nailing the…
Thorlabs scope building blocks
Posted in Hardware
At the SfN meeting in San Diego this year, I met Jeff Brooker from Thorlabs. Jeff and his team of about 17 people have a history of working together in industry on photonics. They…
sCMOS vs. EMCCD
Posted in Hardware
In the last post, commenter Christophe asked about sCMOS cameras. He was interested in higher light level applications, but for the sake of comparison, here’s a picture of their low light performance, compared to an interline CCD and a back-illuminated EMCCD (pdf).
Cameras for ultra low light levels
Posted in Hardware
Many image sensors are built backwards, just like the retina. The actual photon detectors are buried behind a mesh of circuitry. Back-illuminated sensors, where the detectors are put…
PMTs for 2-photon imaging
Posted in Hardware
On the topic of custom two-photon imaging rigs, what kind of PMTs do you want to go with? Naturally, you’ll order yours to be hand selected for high quantum efficiency…
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