Custom enclosures, great and small
Posted in Hardware
A friend recently asked me about custom enclosures. I thought they wanted something small for electronics, and there are a couple of previous Labrigger posts that could be helpful.
Over 100 DIY pieces of lab equipment
Posted in Hardware
Labrigger previously mentioned this contest. All of the 173 projects are online for your perusal. See if any of them inspire you.
…
PubPeer browser plugins for PubMed
Posted in Software
PubPeer has released browser plugins that add a line to PubMed results if there are comments on PubPeer for those publications. It looks like the example above. The install took less than 10…
Preserve your rights – Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine
Posted in Tips
Creative Commons‘ science section has an easy-to-use web page that generates a PDF form you can attach to the publisher’s copyright form to ensure you reserve certain rights.
Previously…
Controlling a bunch of servos
Posted in Hardware
A friend just asked a quick question: How can I make a bunch of cheap (not fast) laser shutters? Here’s a quick answer: For motors, servos are pretty easy to use. Put a piece…
Design tips for data tables
Posted in Tips
Most scientists have adopted minimalistic design principles for graphs. We still sometimes see 3D bar charts, but it’s rare. Data tables are another story. Sometimes journals take the formatting of data tables out of the hands of the authors. Perhaps they recognize that it’s…
EasyEDA – Electronics design in a browser
Posted in Hardware
EasyEDA is an online electronic design automation (EDA) tool. It has all the required parts: schematic drawing, simulation, and PCB layout. It also has some nice features that make sharing easy….
OpenPicoAmp: an open lipid bilayer amplifier
Posted in Hardware
Up on arXiv just recently, is Shlyonsky, Dupuis, and Gall’s OpenPicoAmp. They pitch it as an educational tool, and that’s probably what it’s best suited for, but the recordings look nice. It’s a fun…
Mouser’s open hardware site
Posted in Hardware
Mouser has a new open hardware site that makes it easy to compare different platforms by specifications.
…
Sourcing small parts
Posted in Hardware
When McMaster-Carr doesn’t carry the tiny parts you’re looking for, where can you go?
There used to be a company called Small Parts, and their catalog was great because everything in it was…
Vendors, please sort the measurement list
Posted in Tips
Dear Vendors with Product Search Interfaces,
This list of measurements is complete nonsense. It’s sorted alphabetically, not even numerically (numbers are treated as letters). That’s why “24 inches” comes before “3 inches”, with “27.0 millimeters” in between. It’s not hard to fix. Convert all…
ScanBox – free, open, MATLAB-based software for two-photon microscopy
Posted in Software
Dario Ringach has written some nice software for the Trachtenberg scope mentioned before on Labrigger. They also have put together their own Cypress PSoC-based hardware box to control several parts of the system.
He…
Protocols.io – 3 days left
Posted in Software
As Labrigger mentioned earlier this week, ZappyLab is running a Kickstarter campaign to jump start their crowd-sourced protocol repository, Protocols.io.
Perhaps the most attractive reward they’re offering for pledging are the Black…
ZappyLab Kickstarter: 1 week left!
Posted in Software
This is exactly up the alley of what Labrigger is interested in supporting. There’s just one week left in their Kickstarter campaign. As of this writing, 300 people have contributed $30,000. With one final push this last week, they’ll meet their goal.
They want to crowd…
StimFit
Posted in Software
Christoph Schmidt-Hieber and his collaborators Guzman and Schlogel have developed a cross platform (Linux, Windows, and OS X) application for analyzing electrophysiology data. Here’s the paper (open access). And here’s the…