Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 238

FIGURE 6.81 3-D printable test tube racks.
As complexity is free with the sharing of digital designs, it is just as easy to replicate an in-
expensive test tube rack as it is to make an $850 magnetic rack. For example, Andrew Adey
(Thingiverse user Acadey) is a graduate student in the Shendure Lab, University of Washing-
ton, Genome Sciences who became frustrated with the seemingly criminal charges for magnet
racks. 86 He designed a 96-well plate/0.2 ml strip tube magnet rack 87 shown in Figure 6.82 . It
can perform magnetic bead separation for a 96-well plate, or alternatively, a 96-well plate with
the wells cut out can be taped on top to hold eight tube strips. The magnets are available for
about $6 a piec e 88 , making it possible to justify the cost of a RepRap with a single (or at most
two) standard commercial magnetic racks that normally run between $450 and $900. Simil-
arly, he designed a magnetic rack for eight 1.5 ml tubes as shown in Figure 6.83 , which can
be put together with 70 cent magnets, saving you hundreds of dollars per rack . 89 As we have
seen throughout this topic, open designs are iterative and are able to be easily built upon. The
University of Washington plans on climbing the ladder of open-source sophistication and are
obtaining a high-resolution printer for more fine-scale designs. 90 They hope to build some ma-
chines for automated sample processing using 3-D printed items along with fluidics controlled
by the open-source Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. You may want to consider helping them.