$35 electrochemical analyzer

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cyclic voltammetry, differential pulse voltammetry, square wave voltammetry, and potentiometry

For $35? Color me impressed. We always had to use $20k potentiostats and make and calibrate our own electrodes to do that stuff.

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And if you don’t stop jerking off your tennis elbow will never get better.

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$20k for what a microcontroller and couple ADCs/DACs can do for pennies these days. With software tricks to compensate for various nonlinearities in the cheap circuitry.

The lab gear is MASSIVELY overpriced.

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My doctor already orders labs and adjusts my prescriptions by email, why shouldn’t I do the labs at home? The trick of sending the data over audio seems like a really novel idea.

True, thought we had to drive a lot more current than something like this could. It really depends. If you’ve got the funding, it makes a lot more sense to just buy gear and have your minions spend their time doing research. If you don’t it starts to seem a lot more reasonable to have your students build their own equipment. Any worthwhile grad student in the physical sciences could build a computer controlled potentiostat, but doing it, and writing the software you need to control it when you’re doing more complex experiments, would take a whole lot of time that could be spent more productively doing actual research.

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And that’s why we need cheap, opensource gear. Already there if you want to just use it, for two-zeroes fewer bucks. If you want something special that the off-the-shelf version does not do, a weekend job. Everybody wins at the end, except Agilent and their ilk.

I hope this thing will be open enough for this approach. A closed-source gadget is better than nothing but lab grade stuff should be easily hackable and customizable.

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Tricorder reading, Bones?

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Where’d they find the ‘retro’ cellphone?

where’s the link to buy one?

i’ll check back in a year, and i’ll expect this device to be selling for $350.

vaporware, promises, promises.

Am I the only person that finds it ironic that the paper is behind a paywall?

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I for one wouldn’t mind if someone “liberated” the paper…

The FDA-approved version which hospitals, doctor’s offices, clinics, and school nurses will be required to use will be available in 2022 and cost $11,500 a pop.

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I understand its probably the least glamorous use but a blood glucose test that doesn’t use test strips is brilliant. I spend $40 a month on test strips and my insurance company spends 3 or 4 times that on me alone. I’m a type 1 so not really on the diabetes bandwagon but the potential savings of money and lives is huge. I know many diabetics don’t do tests because they can’t afford the strips. I kind of feel like the headline is a little bit of click bait as there is no sales info anywhere to be found, but it got me here so thanks.

Afraid it won’t be the case. The test strips use a chemical reaction to convert the glucose amount to amount of something that can be measured electrochemically, in an indirect way. Direct electrochemical measurement AFAIK doesn’t work (yet). Spectrometric measurements are an alternative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose_meter#Technology

Edit: This device is however much more versatile than the common ones, which could allow using a wider number of kinds of test stripes, possibly allowing development of way cheaper ones.

Thought. Occasionally counterfeit strips appear that are much cheaper but also may be pretty off. Could it be feasible to e.g make a number of measurements with both genuine and counterfeit strips, compare the values, and if they are consistent but off by just a factor, use the cheaper ones only and multiply the results by the factor (with occasional use of an additional genuine strip to make sure nothing is drifting off)? Essentially using the known-good expensive ones as calibrators for the cheaper ones?

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