Hardware

The Open bionics project was inspired by the Yale open hand project, aiming to develop light, affordable, and modular robot hands and myoelectric prosthesis. Also they want to make them easy to replicate using off the shelf materials.

With the rise of low cost 3D printers, and other cheap manufacturing tools, the field of robotics and prosthetics has been gaining quite a few open source projects. Two very nice compilations can be found at openrobot hardware and at Soft robotics toolkit.

Backyard brains started out producing low cost, portable, electrophysiology systems to bring neuroscience to classrooms and help promote it. “Backyard brains wants to be for neuroscience, what the telescope is for astronomers” – meaning that the idea is that with a couple of hundred dollars anyone can get one of these recording systems and start doing experiments, like amateur astronomers can buy telescopes and start observing the cosmos.

This neat little project uses some plexi-glass, lens extracted from a laser pointer to harvest the power of smartphone cameras for some very big amplifications! Yoshinok manged to see cell plasmolysis and some other cool features with it.

Attys is an wearable data acquisition device with a special focus on biomedical signals such as heart activity (ECG), muscle activity (EMG) and brain activity (EEG). It’s open firmware, open API and has open source applications on github in C++ and JAVA to encourage people to create their own custom versions for mobile devices, tablets and PC.

This project uses a 32X32 LED array (1024 LEDs in total) and a beagle bone black board. The page describing the project has very nice explanations on how the whole system works (and LED displays in general).

Blinkenschild is a portable sign consisting of 960 RGB LEDs. The images/movies to be displayed are stored in a SD card in a Teensy3 board and controlled via bluetooth. Resolution is not as high as LCD monitors but the refresh rate is much higher:

BPM Biosignal is a two stage amplifier created mainly for educational purposes. Check their YouTube Channel.

BrainMap expands the accessible DIY projects for brain activity measurements. This is the conclusion project of Patrick Dear and Mark Bunney Jr. at Cornell university where they used infrared leds to measure differences in blood flow at the scalp and map the motor cortex.

Katharina and Alex are developing a classic PCR machine: 16 samples and a heated lid. You can find more details of their project here Here is a demo video: