Category Archives: Lab

Chemical Hacking at a Store Near You

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Imagine for a minute that you aren’t an electronic-savvy Hackaday reader. But you find an old chemistry book at a garage sale and start reading it. It has lots of interesting looking experiments, but they all require chemicals with strange exotic names. One of them is ferric chloride. You could go find a scientific supply company, but that’s expensive and often difficult to deal with as an individual (for example, 2.5 liters of nitric acid costs over $300 for a case of six at a common lab supply company). Where would you go?

As an astute electronics guy (or gal) …read more

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Bring Doping, Mirofluidics, Photovoltaics, and More Into the Home

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Can you make a spectrometer for your home lab all from materials you have sitting around? We might not believe it from a less credible source, but this MIT course does indeed build a spectrometer from foam board using two razor blades as the silt cover and a writable CD as the diffraction grating. The coolest part is removing the metal backing of the CD.

Hackaday reader [gratian] tipped us off about the course available from MIT courseware called Nanomaker. It boils down some fairly complicated experiments to the kind one can do in the home lab without involving thousands …read more

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Cheap Vacuum Source For Working With Dangerous Chemicals

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[Nurdrage] puts out a lot of neat videos, mostly about home chemistry. For the home chemist it is occasionally desirable to pull a vacuum. For example, a potentially dangerous chemical can be boiled and distilled at a much lower temperature than at atmospheric pressures.

However, there’s a problem with just going to the local import store and buying the first vacuum pump on the shelf.  They are primarily designed for atmospheric gasses and tend to melt when exposed to solvents. If you’re a big university or a commercial lab this is no problem. You just drop three grand on a …read more

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Lego-Like Chemistry and Biology Erector Set

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A team of researchers and students at the University of California, Riverside has created a Lego-like system of blocks that enables users to custom build chemical and biological research instruments. The system of 3D-printed blocks can create a variety of scientific tools.

The blocks, which are called Multifluidic Evolutionary Components (MECs) appeared in the journal PLOS ONE. Each block in the system performs a basic lab instrument task (pumping fluids, making measurements or interfacing with a user, for example). Since the blocks are designed to work together, users can build apparatus — like bioreactors for making alternative fuels or acid-base …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Helping Millions See Clearly

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Slit lamps are prohibitively expensive in the third world areas of India where they are most needed. An invention that’s been around for over a hundred years, the slit lamp is a simple-in-concept way to see and diagnose a large array of ocular issues.

Since they are relatively old by technological standards, the principles behind them have become more and more understood as time has gone on. While a nice lab version with a corneal microscope is certainly better, innovations in manufacturing have brought the theoretical minimum cost of the device way down, or at least that’s what [Kewal Chand …read more

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