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umafuckitt writes:
Early microscopists and electrophysiologists were pathfinders who built their own hardware to perform their experiments. Today, whilst much cutting edge biology still requires the experimenter to develop new equipment, a huge amount of excellent work can be done with off-the-shelf hardware.
The problem, however, is that a lot of this equipment is over-priced for what it is and it's usually closed and so hard to hack. Thus, it may not be surprising that a home-brew hardware revolution is quietly taking place in biology. Rather than building novel equipment, a lot of today's scientists are coming up with much cheaper and more flexible solutions for existing commercial devices. Opensource hardware is a great way of stretching grant money, bringing science into schools, and allowing researchers in poorer countries to do more with their limited budgets. Central to most Opensource hardware projects are easy to use microcontroller packages, such as Arduino, Maple, and Teensy, allowing biologists with no engineering background to re-invent their closed, mass-produced, and expensive hardware. One reason this reinvention has been so effective is because a lot of the equipment still being sold today is based upon older designs that have not been updated in many years.
Here is a selection of some of what's out there now:
- OpenPCR is a $600 thermocycler used for amplifying DNA for detection and sequencing. OpenPCR is at least ten times cheaper than competing commercial alternatives.
- Open Ephys is a hardware/software platform for electrically recording neural activity from multiple electrode channels. Cost savings are huge.
- Pulse Pal is a arbitrary wavefrom generator, competing with far more expensive commercial alternatives such as the Master 8.
- OpenStage is a complete motor control system that provides sub-micron motions for microscope stages. A system can be assembled for about $1000, which is what what some commercial vendors are charging for just the joystick input to their controllers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by nukkel on Thursday March 27 2014, @04:56PM
I'm not familiar with the field, but I think it is a good thing to reduce the income these established equipment companies get out of their old cash cows. It will hopefully motivate them to divert more resources to R&D and come up with new, interesting equipment (and after N years, the cycle can repeat).
(Score: 1) by sbgen on Thursday March 27 2014, @07:15PM
I completely agree. You might want to read the post by AC (replying to my post above) to get some idea why things are so expensive in the above field.
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 3, Informative) by umafuckitt on Thursday March 27 2014, @07:39PM
Some things are patented, yes, but that's likely not the general reason why stuff is so expensive. For example, take the link to the joystick in the original post. Nothing is patented there, but the thing still costs a grand. So why is some stuff absurdly expensive?
One reason is time savings. You're a stressed academic and you need data. You know you can buy widget X to solve your problem and it'll be here this week. If you design it yourself it will take longer; maybe much longer. This initial time investment will go down as more opensource hardware is released and researchers can begin modifying existing designs rather than building from scratch. Leveraging what's available in the hobby electronics movement has really helped in this regard.
The second reason these companies can charge absurd money is that a lot of researchers, particularly in the "soft" sciences, can't program and have few technical skills. They'll pay whatever is asked of them because they have no choice and consider all this stuff to be magic. I'll give you an example. Someone I know works on human gait and purchased a 3-D tracking system that records human locomotion and converts it into some useful stats they need. They were excited recently because the company has just produced a new version of the software which allows the data to exported as .csv or .xls and so they can get stuff into Excel directly. Prior to this they were printing out the data and typing it in manually into Excel. I don't know what format the software used to produce, but clearly there must have been some way to automate the export process before (even if it required programming knowledge to read proprietary binary files). For a lot of people, however, if their software can't do X then they assume X isn't possible. A second great example was a guy I know who bought a $10k system to track animal position over time. The system arrived and it was just a crappy $100 frame made out of parts from McMaster Carr, a CCD camera, and a PC with some simple software to read out the animal's position. Most people in my lab could have made such a system in an afternoon with a web cam.
(Score: 1) by sbgen on Thursday March 27 2014, @08:22PM
That is interesting - you are making me curious. If I may ask, what is the software your buddy bought to track animals? And which animal/s can it track? Our lab could probably find it useful. I agree with your assessment about time constraint and unfamiliarity with coding contributing to the expense of the instruments and fleecing thereof. Hopefully this will change with time as you suggest. However, patents do hinder research and particularly applied side of it.
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Thursday March 27 2014, @08:40PM
Ha, ha... The guy in question was a work dodger (now fired) and never used the system (or did any experiments at all, for that matter). I have no idea what the system is (it has no labels on it). He bought it to track fly larvae. It was a particularly dumb thing for him to do, given that we already had two different pieces of in-house software to track adult flies. There's also this [sourceforge.net]. So it's really an easy problem for 2-D. There are published 3-D solutions too.
(Score: 1) by sbgen on Thursday March 27 2014, @08:53PM
Thanks, ctrax is a good software, I had forgotten about it. We have software from CleverSys to track rodents.
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Friday March 28 2014, @07:01AM
Very good points.