Many manufacturers distribute catalogs that include extensive tutorial sections. You could really teach a pretty extensive engineering course on optics using nothing more than the front pages of the CVI Melles Griot catalog. In this post I’ll point you to some of…
Lickometers detect when an animal, usually a rodent, licks a water port. They’re useful in all sorts of behavioral tasks, ranging from addiction experiments (spike the water and see how much they consume), to psychophysics…
Low magnification, high numeric aperture (NA) microscope objectives are popular choices for multiphoton imaging. They offer excellent light collection properties, a wide field of view, and still permit high resolution imaging. However, they are challenging…
Most institutions have their own workshops that will machine parts for researchers, but these workshops are of varying quality and capacity. Often researches will become frustrated by their local workshop estimating delivery times on…
This is a little gadget I find handy sometimes. It lets me use a TTL line to select between two routes for a coaxial cable. It’s dirt simple– just an SPDT relay– and…
Where do you get your optomechanics from?
Newport is a big, one-stop-shop. Get your Ti:Sapph laser, air table, and mechanics all in one place.
ThorLabs has a great line of standard…
Processing is a programming language geared towards visual artists, but it comes in handy for a lot of other purposes as well. Here are some of its finer points:
Open source
Integrated IDE (see…
When you want a custom plastic piece fast (and the design isn’t amenable to being made out of multiple flat laser cut pieces) then 3D printing is the way to go.
3D printing is actually a whole family of different processes: SLS,…
It’s not too hard to find a laser cutting firm that will do small orders and offer very rapid turn around. The precision, quick turn around, and the ability to work without proper…
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