Category | Goals


The final stretch

10 May 2010 |  Posted by tito |  0 Comment.
0
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...



Goals for OpenPCR

09 Apr 2010 |  Posted by tito |  4 Comments.
4
We want to produce an open design for a PCR machine. Our goal is to start this project up quickly and finish it. After that, we would like to move onto other things, such as SNPs or PCR kits or synthetic biology. A DIY Xerox machine for DNA: A fast, computer controlled PCR machine that uses normal PCR tubes and may be built mostly with off the shelf components + free schematics. It does thermal cycling as well as boil, cool, and freeze (4C) samples. 1. Track the development process through blog posts and photos, to follow the design process from idea to reality, and how that reality changes...



First look

31 Mar 2010 |  Posted by tito |  0 Comment.
0
I met up with Josh and Xia for some awesome Korean BBQ on Friday. Got my first look at the thermal cycler, which is working! We spent about an hour making sure that the LCD screen displays the most relevant text in the right places. I also brought a case prototype and we talked about industrial design and how to make the samples the most prominent part of the device. We saw that a good way to make the device more friendly was to isolate the gigantic power supply from the core unit. We've established that a successful project: 1. works (heats up and cools down, able to hit temperature targets...