Team:Baltimore US/Notebook/DIYEquipment

DIY Equipment Notes

Designs

Semi-Final Equipment Mockups

First design integrating power and control onto the same board. Worked but we decided to seperate the power and the control for safety and cost reasons.

Several designs we made separated power and control. The first three of these were laid out several times for ease of construction. The designs worked, however only for the electrophoresis. They consisted of a simple bridge circuit, voltage sensor, and a micro controller driving the circuit. A design decision was made to attempt to get the electrophoresis and the PCR working with the same control electronics. This meant that since we were going to use a Peltier device for the PCR, we could not use a simple bridge like we used in this design.

For the final design we decided to separate the main controller from the bridges completely. We added a low power H-Bridge to heat the lid of the PCR device and added a temperature sensor to allow us to read the PCR temperature and implement a simple control loop.