Re: OpenPCR's Thermocycler - Is is reliable?

I use an OpenPCR in my lab, and I'm very satisfied with my purchase. The
first time I used my OpenPCR was the *first* time a PCR has worked for
me without troubleshooting.

I've used many machines, and the OpenPCR is the best. The others offered
nothing over the OpenPCR's abilities, and if they broke they were
designed to be impossible to easily repair or maintain. They were also
hard to program and offered no logging functions to speak of.

With the OpenPCR, you get the same fundamental machine in a prettier and
more portable package, but it's far more easily maintained and debugged,
cheaper to repair or replace, and it can be polled by the controlling PC
easily to log temperature curves.

In short, I highly recommend one.

Do bear in mind that if money is a constraint, you can hack together a
PCR machine out of lightbulbs and PC case fans, if you have a
microcontroller handy to control them (i.e. Arduino). I've never
performed a test reaction on my own one, but the temperature curve data
looked really attactive during testing: I was using a heat gun and a
cooling fan in a coffee can, with an LM35 temperature sensor. All
arduino controlled via solid state AC relays.

On 29/12/11 03:30, Jacob wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am a biotechnology hobbiest located in Oregon, and I have always
> loved biology and genetics. I was granted the amazing opportunity two
> years ago to go to the medical school OHSU in Portland, Oregon, to
> sequence a section of my own DNA. It was there that I learned to run a
> thermocycler, do PCR, and load a gel tray. Ever since then, I have
> been wishing I could get more into the field, but alas, I am still
> just a lowly high school junior, so it may be a while. Or so I
> thought.
> I found out about OpenPCR a month ago, and I have been frantically
> gathering funds since then to purchase one of their thermocyclers,
> which is the first ever that is in my price range. I was very excited
> to buy one, and surprisingly even more excited to trudge through their
> 60-some page instruction book to figure out how to put the damn thing
> together, until a friend brought up a point I shrugged off at first,
> but now it really concerns me. "What if it doesn't actually work?"
> Seeing as I am sinking over $600 into this machine along, not to
> mention all the other costs associated such as reagents and pipettes,
> I would like to know if any of you here have had experiences wit the
> device, and how it worked for you. From what I can tell, and the
> videos that show the device, it seems like it's a very robust and well-
> made device. But even so, I'd like to how well it is working for any
> of you who may have one. Is it reliable? Are the parts robust? Is the
> cycling precise? Any kinks, flaws, or extra hacks I should know
> about?
>
> Thank you!
> --Jacob
>

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