Met up with Josh today in Saratoga. Checked everything out, sure is wacky how the nuts and bolts are the hardest part, and the sexy cool components were relatively easy to find (peltier, cpu heat sink, ponoko case). I spent Friday night and Saturday day looking all over for small angle brackets, to no avail. I found some 3/4″ plastic ones on a robotics website, so we will have to make do with those even though 1/4″ would be ideal. At least the plastic ones we can drill our own holes, these steel ones from Ace were impossible to drill through!
We focused on the lid today, which has turned out to be quite a tricky component, both the heating element and mechanical specifications of the lid are complex. The lid has to be in full contact with each of the tubes, even if someone is using a different size tube from what Josh and I are using. The lid has to heat up to 100C and not melt itself or the casing. More to come!
Ordering all the components for my OpenPCR machine tonight. Placing the order for our revised Ponoko cases as well — removed 1/3 of the vents, redid the hole for the LCD (the spec I had was totally wrong…no good spec on adafruit so I just measured it by hand), and added holes so we can mount the H bridge.