Open Source - Mag Bead Separation Apparatus

During the testing boom for the pandemic, mag bead based separations took up a large portion of the time processing each sample.

This is an apparatus meant to be used on deck on any liquid handling platform.

The point behind this design was to offload the heating, shaking, separation, and “plate movement” functions to a single peripheral while allowing the liquid handler to focus solely on pipetting functions. I picture six or eight of these integrated in one system increasing throughput quite a bit.

This was designed to use all off the shelf parts such as NEMA steppers, Arduino controllers, and other misc. hardware.

Haven’t done much with this design lately, but thought others might appreciate it.

Link to a quick animation on Youtube.
https://youtu.be/VLRS3IPGIRc

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Super cool! Any plans to prototype? Also curious to see how the shaking mechanism works

Thank you! I did start a prototype but got busy with other things. I may pick it back up during this winter.

The shaking is generated by three offset pulleys driven by a NEMA stepper. I also designed a customizable 3D printed dampener system that will need to be refined.

I’ll be sure to update this thread when more is completed.

Thanks again for your interest!

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