Nyx Tracker for widefield Astrophotography

LabOnTheCheap posts tend to be microscopy heavy, but what about microscopy’s extroverted cousin, telescope photometry? One issue while taking long exposures of celestial objects is tracking their diurnal motion in the sky as the earth rotates. Robust tracking mechanisms start at around ~$300 and quickly go up in price for more accuracy and heavier telescopes. […]

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MesoSPIM: An open-source light-sheet microscope for imaging in cleared tissue

The mesoSPIM (mesoscale selective plane illumination microscopy) project creates open-hardware microscopy platforms for imaging cleared tissue samples. The microscopy setup costs between $170,000 to $240,000 including the optical table and most importantly, the laser itself which will run you between $40,000 to $110,000. This stretches the definition of “On The Cheap”, but the project is […]

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A Workhorse for 18k: DIY Microscopy with Flexiscope

The Flexiscope is DIY microscope that can be easily converted from upright to inverted configurations in “under 30 minutes”. It’s capable of oblique infrared illumination imaging, multi-channel fluorescent imaging, automated 3D scanning, and even has an electrophysiology configuration. The paper, written by Amy Courtney, Luke Alvey , George Merces, and Mark Pickering which details the […]

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An Open-Source Plate Reader

Plate readers are instruments which are used to detect properties of samples in microtiter plates, via absorbance, fluorescence, and luminescence. Karol Szymula, Michael Magaraci, Michael Patterson, Andrew Clark, Sevile Mannickarottu, and Brian Chow published a paper in September 2018 detailing the construction and performance of an open-source plate reader. The extensive supplementary materials provide everything you will need, from software to parts list to a […]

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