Re: [DIYbio] Re: Electronic requirements for redesign of Arduino PCR thermal cycler

Mm, and the price of a bare ATMEGA with the Arduino bootloader burned on
often floats around ~€1, so if one desperately wants to develop
something that can be minimalised and commercialised later PIC style,
the scope is all there. I think the overhead of the bootloader is in a
small startup time penalty and code size overhead but otherwise minimal,
and it comes with Serial as a core service which can be very valuable.

I know people who've developed stuff in raw C for PIC chips just for the
small performance boon and to say they'd done it, but even they hadn't
much conviction that the extra effort had won them much at the end.

On 24/03/15 12:29, Brian Degger wrote:
> Agree with both of you.
> If you are hard core electrical engineer, you might use something else,
> there is no need for a requirement 1.
> But on the other hand, I would have to say where would 3d printing be
> without arduino?
> Remember Arduino is just a breakout board for atmel mega(and arm and
> many more including texas instrument chips if you want) + an programing
> environment/ide.
> Who was it built for? Electrical engineers? Nup, it was for people like
> cathal and me, who want to tinker, and to enable designers to make
> hardware prototypes and readymades.
>
> If you get further down the line, its likely you design your own pcb
> board with what you want, keep the chip, and away you go.
>
>
> Brian
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Cathal Garvey
> <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me <mailto:cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me>> wrote:
>
> That's all well and good, but putting together a thermal cycler with
> an Arduino requires no shields, less and more reasonable code, and
> no additional equipment (programmers, etcetera) over and above the
> Arduino and USB. It requires an AC solid state relay, LM35 sensor, a
> heat gun and a computer cooling fan.
>
> Telling people to use PICs because they'll save €5 on the cost of
> the chip, even if it wastes days of their time because the community
> is smaller and more techie and purist, is a bit useless. People want
> to get stuff done, and people are rarely without the €5 needed to
> grab an arduino, copy/paste some ubiquitous code, and get stuff done.
>
>
> On 24/03/15 10:05, Jonathan Cline wrote:
>
> It is several x more expensive as a building block, similar to
> the Lego
> analogy -- and always needs to add more pieces. It is not for real
> ("college undergrad level") projects. The household name comes
> from
> the marketing push and the plethora of required 3rd party pieces --
> which makes money for those other companies (including the kit
> suppliers, like Ada), who also do more marketing, and so on. The
> lameness of Arduino needing shields which boost business for kit
> suppliers and make it a well-known product placement in catalogs
> is no
> justification for using it in an engineering design. "There's a
> reason
> xx is a household name" could apply to many xx's which are similarly
> worse choices. Unfortunately the projects built with Arduino
> are also
> falsely labelled "diy low cost" when in fact they are not at all low
> cost in comparison and others are also led astray. When a lot
> of script
> kiddies talk volumes about a technology, it does not mean the
> technology
> is beneficial. A lot of the talk is simply confusion or from
> lack of
> education. Technology which works does not get as much verbiage in
> comparison precisely because it "just works" once the initial
> learning
> curve is overcome.
>
> The software application which allows cutting & pasting the code you
> mention into your projects likely works on any number of better
> hardware
> kits since it is in a high level language.
>
> So I repeat my recommendation and have improved it slightly --
>
> Requirement #1:
> * Sell the Arduino on ebay.
>
> ## Jonathan Cline
> ## jcline@ieee.org <mailto:jcline@ieee.org>
> ## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223 <tel:%2B1-805-617-0223>
> ########################
>
> On 3/24/15 1:17 AM, Cathal Garvey wrote:
>
> Arduino is fine and highly productive for beginners compared
> to PIC
> whatevers. There's a reason Arduino is a household name and
> PIC-number-number-number-__number is not.
>
> I've built functioning thermal cyclers on Arduinos without
> issue, and
> with easily reasonable code (although I was using a pre-written
> finite-state-machine library, the availability of which is
> just more
> reason to use a widely used platform like Arduino).
>
> On 24/03/15 02:38, Jonathan Cline wrote:
>
> Requirement #1:
> * Throw away the Arduino.
>
>
> I am going to add to the FAQ:
> "Do not use Arduino for real projects. It is like
> building an
> automobile out of Legos and then expecting to actually
> drive it."
>
>
> Also, fyi to Nathan. LM339 is a comparator not an opamp
> so it is not a
> good signal buffer. Use an opamp. See my article in
> Biocoder #6.
>
>
> ## Jonathan Cline
> ## jcline@ieee.org <mailto:jcline@ieee.org>
> ## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223 <tel:%2B1-805-617-0223>
> ########################
>
>
> On Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 4:49:50 AM UTC-8,
> Andy Morgan wrote:
>
>
>
> So, I've slightly redesigned the Arduino PCR
> thermal cycler
> (http://www.instructables.com/__id/Arduino-PCR-thermal-cycler-__for-under-85/?ALLSTEPS
> <http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-PCR-thermal-cycler-for-under-85/?ALLSTEPS>
>
> <http://www.instructables.com/__id/Arduino-PCR-thermal-cycler-__for-under-85/?ALLSTEPS
> <http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-PCR-thermal-cycler-for-under-85/?ALLSTEPS>>)
>
> to make it a bit better, by replacing the two
> wiremound resistors
> (100watts) with a cartridge heater (300watts)
> (http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/__Cartridge-Heater-3-8-Diameter-__3-2-Length-220VAC-300W-/__380898256650?pt=AU_B_I___Electrical_Test_Equipment&__hash=item58af4e270a
> <http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Cartridge-Heater-3-8-Diameter-3-2-Length-220VAC-300W-/380898256650?pt=AU_B_I_Electrical_Test_Equipment&hash=item58af4e270a>
>
> <http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/__Cartridge-Heater-3-8-Diameter-__3-2-Length-220VAC-300W-/__380898256650?pt=AU_B_I___Electrical_Test_Equipment&__hash=item58af4e270a
> <http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Cartridge-Heater-3-8-Diameter-3-2-Length-220VAC-300W-/380898256650?pt=AU_B_I_Electrical_Test_Equipment&hash=item58af4e270a>>).
>
>
>
> But the thing is: I have ZERO experience with
> electronics, and I
> don't know whether the cartridge heater will
> require too much power
> from the Arduino board or power supply, and all the
> explanations
> I've found on the internet seem to go WAY over my head.
>
> Does anybody know whether the cartridge heater will
> work?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
> --
> Scientific Director, IndieBio Irish Programme
> Got a biology-inspired business idea that $50,000 -
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> --
> ----------------------------------------
> Brian Degger
> twitter: @drbrian
>
> http://makerspace.org.uk
> http://transitlab.org <http://transitlab.org/>
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--
Scientific Director, IndieBio Irish Programme
Got a biology-inspired business idea that $50,000 -
& 3 months in a well equipped lab could accelerate?
Apply for the Summer programme in Ireland:
http://indie.bio/apply-to-ireland
Twitter: @onetruecathal
Phone: +353876363185
miniLock: JjmYYngs7akLZUjkvFkuYdsZ3PyPHSZRBKNm6qTYKZfAM
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