3D printed electronics
Posted in Hardware
It’s been promised for a while now, but someone has to do the hard work to make it happen. That inevitably involves some pretty pitiful looking stepping stones on the way to the promised land….
Category: Hardware
Arduino + x86 power
Posted in Hardware
The Intel Galileo is an interesting mashup. It’s Arduino compatible. You can hand it to an undergrad and they can download the Arduino IDE and program it on their own with relatively little training. However,…
TriggerScope for imaging system device control
Posted in Hardware
Austin Blanco has designed and built an open-source system for controlling complex imaging systems called TriggerScope. It’s highly customizable out of the box, and both the firmware and software are open.
Olympus 10x for two-photon microscopy
Posted in Hardware
Olympus released a suite of new objectives this year, and one of them is this 10x/0.6 NA. This is probably the longest focal length (180/10 = 18 mm) objective you can get and use with…
Patch clamp amplifier in chip form
Posted in Hardware
See that metal box the pipette holder is attached to? That’s not a headstage, that’s the whole patch clamp amplifier. Reid Harrison is the lead author (co-senior authors are Craig Forest and Ed Boyden) on…
Field of view = 3.5 mm with cellular resolution
Posted in Hardware
In this preprint, Stirman et al. report achieving a 3.5 mm field of view with 2-photon excitation with cellular resolution. The design involves custom scan optics and a custom objective built in the SLAB….
Lightfield imaging – development kit from Lytro
Posted in Hardware
Lytro is releasing a development kit for their light field camera. That’s nice, but it pretty expensive. And we’ve been able to buy light field cameras for technical uses for years.
What’s special…
Raspberry Pi oscilloscope
Posted in Hardware
One can use a Raspberry Pi as a highly customizable 20 MHz scope with this cute little BitScope Micro. (about 120 euros, from the OE store)
They have their…
MultiSIM BLUE – free circuit design software
Posted in Hardware
MultiSIM BLUE is yet another free, SPICE-based electronics simulator– this one is linked into the MOUSER catalog, to streamline parts sourcing. Also includes PCB design tools.
…
miniPCR – $500 diy open thermocycler
Posted in Hardware
BioCoder recently featured miniPCR on their cover. They currently have a well funded Kickstarter running, if you’d like to jump on board.
It’s a cute little package, weighing less than 1 pound.
…
Rolling shutter vs. global shutter: why it matters
Digital cameras can have global shutters or rolling shutters (some cameras can operate in both modes). Global shutters are preferable for periodic applications, including intrinsic imaging, because rolling shutters can cause artifacts. This article does a nice job of explaining the artifacts…
A Canadian open source two-photon microscope system
Posted in Hardware
This open source two-photon microscope system is adaptable for both slice (with substage detection) and in vivo experiments, and is built with largely COTS parts. The paper is a very nice resource.
See also, …
Resonant scanning with ScanImage 5
Posted in Hardware
ScanImage 5 supports resonant scanning with a wide range of hardware. So custom rigs can add resonant scanning pretty easily, while sticking with ScanImage for acquisition.
More mini computers
Posted in Hardware
Raspberry Pi is the most popular mini computer right now, but there are other options.
SolidRun sells two. The first is a sleek cube called the CuBox-i (pictured above). The second is a barebones board,…
A clock for the Raspberry Pi
Posted in Hardware
The Raspberry Pi is a handy tool, but it has some quirks. One quirk is that there is no internal clock with a battery backup (something most real PCs have). Instead, it syncs with online…