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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OpenDrop

OpenDrop, now in its third version, is an open source digital microfludics platform based off electrowetting technologies, that can confine and move droplets of liquid. The device is made by GaudiLabs, the source of Generic Lab Equipment. The platforms best first impression is probably this software demonstration video: OpenDrop is open source, which means a github […]

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Lab On The Cheap On The Cheap

Last year for April Fools we wrote about the comparative costs of hiring graduate students, postdocs, and lab techs. A pay structure that has always deeply annoyed me. To keep up with the mildly irrelevant LabOnTheCheap April Fools posts, this post is about some numbers near and dear to our hearts: the cheapness of running […]

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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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