The Pachter lab at Caltech has shared its design for the Poseidon project. Poseidon is a 3D-printed syringe pump and microscope system designed for microfluidic experiments, and it is described in a preprint published on bioRxiv. The complete system is controlled by a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and comes with a 7″ touchscreen interface!
Pressure myographs require some way to image the blood vessel mounted in the chamber. We’ve been recommending cheap upright AmScope microscopes that you can get on Amazon, or Nikon’s cheapest inverted offerings. But we thought it would be nice if VasoTracker had its own open source microscope. So we’ve been adapting the Poseidon microscope design for use with our pressure myographs. We’ve even rewritten our diameter tracking software to run on the Raspberry Pi.
All in, the microscope costs less than £150 to make! Check back here soon for an update!