Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DIY Biochemical Scanner From a Hacked CD Drive

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bargain-health-care dept.

holy_calamity writes "Turns out hacking two extra light sensors into a CD drive can turn it into a lab scanner to read the results of high-accuracy immunoassays used to detect disease markers or pathogens, New Scientist reports. The drive proved able to detect pesticides at concentrations as low as 0.02 micrograms per liter."

2 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Missing the Point by ivormi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    However, Corran believes that the Spanish team's procedure needs to be developed further. "They still do part of the assay in a normal plate. Until the whole thing can be done on a CD it doesn't have a great technical advantage."

    I think he's missing the initial point here. The point is to reduce the overall cost of being capable of running the test, not in vastly increasing the efficiency of running a massive batch of tests this way. Certainly there's downstream potential for it, but by itself, this provides testing capabilities to a much wider set of labs.
  2. Why so expensive? by SQLServerBen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real question is, if the laboratory machines are using more or less the same technology as the CD drives, why do the actual lab machines cost so much more? From TFA, the machine this replaces costs 30-60k Euro, compared to 15 Euro for a generic CD drive.