Could you talk about the most difficult technical challenge you came across? The temperature regulation (i.e. the heart of the pcr machine) seems to me like the toughest part to get right.
I had the luck of working in a couple of well funded research labs, and I wonder if some of the tall prices we see for this type of lab equipment is due to "using someone else's" money for research.
In any case, I'm sure there'll be plenty of cash strapped labs around the world who'll make some science with it.
Thanks, we hope to get the word out to a lot of cash strapped labs. Suggestions where find them?
Re: Challenges -- Sounds like a good title for a future blog post: "The Toughest Challenge of OpenPCR". Off the top of my head, 2 challenging areas were the mechanical design of the heated lid and super-hacking Arduino for our USB control. For instance with the heated lid, we knew we had to have a flat hot surface come down on top of the PCR tubes. We went through several mechanical prototypes, and learned that the high tolerance of the heated lid meant that the tolerance for the rest of the device needed to match. Not giving you enough details at this point, but look out for that "challenges" blog post in the future :)
Could you talk about the most difficult technical challenge you came across? The temperature regulation (i.e. the heart of the pcr machine) seems to me like the toughest part to get right.
I had the luck of working in a couple of well funded research labs, and I wonder if some of the tall prices we see for this type of lab equipment is due to "using someone else's" money for research.
In any case, I'm sure there'll be plenty of cash strapped labs around the world who'll make some science with it.