haha @Dakota Hamill it has been a while.
@NicVied, welcome! I think the real question is what you want to do with it. There are a few features to look for when picking a pcr machine:
1) heated lid- without a heated lid (pocketpcr does not have one) you will need to add mineral oil to your samples so that they dont evaporate and condense all over the tube. not a huge pain if you are doing large or rather infrequent samples, but it will be a pain if your samples are tiny and you are doing a lot of them. The other one appears to have a heated lid.
2) number of samples. if you are doing some big science and you want to also run a negative or positive control to help troubleshoot your reaction, you will run out of space in the pocket pcr pretty quickly
3) thermal design- for the open source ones, look at what temperature sensor is in there and how accurate it is. Does the layout of the heater make sense? For tricky reactions, you might need to command the temperature very precisely. This is certainly not a slam vs DIY machines but its something to keep in mind. That said, temperature control is not always super critical. One time we made one (Dakota may have been there) with a lightbulb and a fan. And it worked.
4) consider a used commercial machine. usually the interface is a little clunky but you are getting a product that has actually been tested as lab equipment and probably has a UL or CE cert, that you don't have to build and troubleshoot yourself etc. Usually these have nice enclosures and can cost the same as a kit. You can pick one up (or a whole lab) from the odin (I think).
Fortunately, a lot of these machines, in particular openpcr and minipcr have been around since about the beginning of diybio, so they are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, and they are about a million years ahead of commercial machines in terms of UI and hackability (at least vs the commercial machines I have seen).
Good luck! let us know what you end up buying.
--A
On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 5:36 PM Dakota Hamill <dkotes@gmail.com> wrote:
Can't recommend one since I've never used any of them but there's also.--On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 4:33 PM NicVied <antoni.nicolauv@gmail.com> wrote:Hello everyone,I am biology teacher and I discovered this DIYbio movement one week ago, and it is amaizing. I am thinking of buying a thermal cycler for me and maybe then bring it somehow to the school.I would like to know your opinion about the 2 opensource thermal cycler that I have found:I have read about this one and it seems it works well.This is much cheaper and for me would be perfect buy this one, but I know nothing about this one and it seems too simple...Futher, I would like to ask if you think it is a bit crazy and if it's going to be too much
expensive the rest of material, primers, buffers,... If I just want to play in my home.thanks,--
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