Re: [DIYbio] multielectrode arrays

Hi Eugen,

Homebrewing MEAs seems like a big project in and of itself. Unless you can get someone else to do it for you, it's probably going to be a huge timesink. An idea I had last night for making MEAs "on the cheap", is to use a standard process for making flex PCBs. The smallest pitch you can get with these is on the order of 100 um--about the same as commercial MEAs. (Unless you have some special requirements--how large are these ganglions, roughly?)

The advantage of this is that it's quick (PCB layout and manufacture) and cheap (you can get a lot of PCBs). The latter will help with wear and tear. Gold plating is standard (and also cheap), but still the pads may not hold up as well as titanium-based electrodes. But because the PCBs are so cheap, you can just swap them out after each series of measurements.

If for any reason you don't think PCBs are the right way to go, I think my labmate regularly throws out planar MEAs that don't work so well any more. (Mostly oxidized contacts, I suppose.) If you would like to give refurbishing a try, I could ask him to throw one my way instead of the dustbin. Let me know.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2013 10:09:16 PM UTC+1, eleitl wrote:

On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 12:23:35PM -0800, Nathan McCorkle wrote:

> So that will get your circuit laid out, but you would then need to
> mask off the wires leading to each electrode. Is there an ink-jet

You'd need a dock, with integrated wire electrodes which
make contact to thin-film Pt. Soldering and coating
with epoxy might do with thicker film (thickend by
electrodeposition of peripheral film, covering the core
array with removable laquer).

> clear-coat? Otherwise I'd say you might be able to get away with
> contact lithography and some cheap photoresist.

I've been thinking that way as well. Deposit metal on the slide,
and spin-coat the photoresist, expose, develop, etch.

Toner transfer might just do, in fact. Metal-coated slide
instead of PCB.

It might not do for production, but it will probably do
for a prototype with few leads of a ~cm neural circuit.

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