this is like the "old days" teardowns ...love it !

@alberthofmann420

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah I love them too, same like the Apple product teardowns from EEVBlog Dave which got me subscribed to both of them, feels ages ago... :D

I used to make reagents for flow cytometry. If anyone has any questions, let me know. The missing laser could be 488nm or 533nm laser, both are super common in Flow Cytometry. The lasers are designed to be extremely stable over time rather than have an ultra precise controlled output power. Operators adjust the voltage on the PMT to adjust the signal level. You are correct about the filters because a single laser can excite multiple fluorophores you have to gate on the specific emission wavelengths. The flow cell is physically accessible because operators will clog it from things to time. Spot on with the function of the flow cell with the sample and sheath fluid.

I always love your niche equipment teardowns. More than once weird mechanisms inside them have inspired my own designs, it's incredible to see how some very smart people solve strange problems, especially when they don't have to cheapen it up so much for mass production that sometimes you can recognize the parts inside.

@Tadesan

2 жыл бұрын

I agree. I use the info for my projects too!

My day-to-day work involves a fair amount of flow cytometry- more recently with spectral systems with dozens to low hundred-count PMTs coupled to a set of diffraction gratings or similar optical solutions allowing for separation of 30+ different fluorescent dyes. It makes sense for the 488 laser to be missing- this is the 'baseline' laser for cytometry and the vast majority of one or two laser configurations would include a 488 unless made for a specialized (by the standards of these machines even) application. If you have a laser breakdown, statistically (assuming equal delicacy of laser types) it's going to be a 488 going. You remarked on lack of laser power control- the main user accessible control is photomultiplier voltage. Lasers can be tuned to produce an optimally timed pulse to hit the particles straight on in the flow cell but power tends to be fixed. Characterizing power and keeping it stable is really the more important part and is something the manufacturer tech tends to do on their maintenance visits.

@PedroDaGr8

2 жыл бұрын

Wow, I didn't realize they were up to those levels now. I remember when Mario Roderer became famous for coupling 13+ dyes at a time.

Mike opens a panel to reveal a porthole into extra dimensions with stars and black holes swirling around in cosmic glow. “Not a huge amount to see here.”

Brings me back to the start of my career where I did a lot of design work on diagnostic machines like this. We tended to use LEDs -> photodiode arrangement with modulation techniques to achieve low noise measurement as a preference. The lasers tended to quickly bleach the chemistry which increased the costs of consumables. Nice teardown 👌

Mike panning over fully packed boards : "Pretty straight forward stuff"... I love it

That hole is probably drilled into the glass with a hollow core drill on an ultrasonic machine. That is, the drill moves longitudinally at 40 kHz or so, and rotates, mostly to keep it on center. Sometimes they are diamond grit tipped, but one that small is probably just a stainless steel capillary. coolant would be pumped through the capillary to keep the glass and steel from melting, and to carry away the swarf. I would guess also that the lens is fabricated as part of the glass block, as epoxy yellows quickly at 405 nm, there is a chance its glued with PMMA resin, but making a lens in one piece and lapping it in place is more reliable.

Always love these teardown videos, especially of weird lab gear. Excited to watch this one!

That piece with the photo diode is the detector for forward-scatter (FSC) which detects signals created by small angle scattering in the direction of the beam. The small bar in front of it is just there to block direct laser light from reaching the diode. As you can see from the use of a PD and the ND filter this signal which roughly correlates to cell/particle size is usually very strong. Because it is so easily detected many cytometers use it as the trigger for all the other fluorescence and side-scatter (SSC) channels. Forward- and side-scatter can detect surprisingly small particles with extracellular vesicles being the newest craze in the flow-cytometry world, devices with that feature tend to use shorter wavelengths like 405nm for that. The three pinholes should be located at the image plane of the objective which is looking at the flow cell to set up basic confocal detection by rejecting most light not coming from the focal spots of the lasers. Otherwise you'd have a ton of scatter and reflections from inside the flow cell mucking up your signals. As you are looking at single cells with fluorescent stains which are moving though the detection spot at quite some speed the signals are often pretty weak. However newer devices have improved their light gathering capabilities enough that some can step down from using PMTs and use APDs instead, the newish Beckman Coulter Cytoflex for example does this.

Molten glass retains it's cross-section with micron precision when pulled, the hole was larger, but when pulled the cross-section scaled down uniformly. The blank was then probably lapped to an optical finish, and the half-ball lens may have been optically bonded with adhesive, or just contact bonded. Someone suggested fibre-laser, but it leaves a tapered hole, and I'm quite sure the capillary is made of fused silica and so is transparent to a (quartz)fibre laser. Now if you absolutely must drill a hole, you can get down to ~0.5mm DIY, just snip the eye of a needle so it makes a "Y", and glue/braze a spec of diamond to it.

Love teardown time! We need to find you a Therac-25 to dig into!!😆

Interesting as always, thank you Mike. I do wish you'd invest in a higher resolution camera however.

11:00 You dont drill it, you shrink a large hole to that size. You start with a big hunk of glass with regular sized hole in it, heat it up and stretch it. The big hunk of glass will shrink so will the hole.

Some interesting bits in this device. And yes, the 3.5mm jack really were a surprise to see. Not even gold plated like a lot of other pins in that product. Were more expecting to see a Lemo connector or similar.

Another pre-emptive Thumbs Up...

Love watching your tear downs!

Fascinating equipment, awesome teardown. Thanks so much for sharing.

That flow cell is most certainly quartz, not glass. Quartz is UV transparent.

@christopherleubner6633

Ай бұрын

Yup they are made out of UV silica or BK7 optical glass depending on the wavelengths used. This one uses a 488nm 532nm and a 633nm so it's probably bk7.

I could watch this stuff all day long !...cheers.

Lovely bits in there, nice optics and the little laser is very nice.

Fascinating teardown, thanks for showing this tech that is probably quite rarely seen.

Mike, your teardown videos of specialized equipment are very useful. I got some bargain used Casio beamers to extract lasers and high power LEDs from there thanks to one of your earlier vids.

Designers: So, how overbuilt do you want it? Management: Yes.

I never knew you could get these enclosed photon multiplier modules, I thought most of the time it was still done 'old school style' with separate PSU, custom electronics and a tube. 21:07 That 'spring mechanism' is called a flexure mechanism. In this case it is designed to work as a bearing restricting all degrees of freedom except the translation along the direction perpendicular to the plane of the flexures (Actually, it also allows 2 other degrees of freedom, namely rotation in the two axis defining the flexure plane, but likely it wouldn't really be loaded this way or is constrained by other parts). Without this bearing, the force of the magnet would not be guided in any way. I must say it is kind of odd why they use 5 separate flexural elements as this bearing, as it over-constrains the mechanism. 3 would have done the exact same job but exactly constrained. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, I'd recommend the youtube series by Johnathan Hopkins here on youtube called 'compliant mechanisms'.

Those are very cool little photomultiplier modules!

What i would give to work on a project where i can just add a PXI system to the BoM

The channel in the glass is made by drilling with a diamond drill followed by pumping ultrafine abrasives through it and finally vapors that clean and polish the inside then finally vapor deposited SiO2.

Real neat teardown!

Superb. I've wanted to see how one of these worked for quite some time. Quite straightforward really. No gloves at all? ...potential pathogens?

Can we get big scary laser stickers?

Super informative as ever, just ordered a mug to say thanks.

Wow that takes me back. Used an earlier device back in the late sixties for counting white cells. No lasers back then it used a narrow orifice and pumped the suspension through it and monitored the resistance change.

@2lefThumbs

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah the Coulter Principle rocks

28:04 "Surface Mount Pillow" Perfect for anyone with a chip on one's shoulder ☺️

I wonder if small features on the cell are made by machining a larger piece of glass and then heating it and drawing it down to the smaller size. Dan Gelbart has a demo where he does that kind of thing kzread.info/dash/bejne/gISHs5t9dKq9o6w.html

Bought one of your SM design cups and sent it to a mate for a Xmas pressie. He said it was a nice surprise.

I will wait to bring the popcorn until its 1080p.

Yes yes, but we need a big clive style diagram explaining how it works... 👍🏻

It may started a couple of racks of lab equipment in some research institution or development lab, then they just put all together in a compact form. It may explains the use of standard lab equipment glued to custom stuff.

Hamamatsu photomultiplers, Coherent laser modules - all that staff can help you building a research lab or upgrade existing for low cost.

Diode laser is beautifully constructed

You could use those photomultipliers for building a DIY scintillating detector for radiation detection. These ones are very reliable, the ones with the head on TO15 case PMT are failure prone. ❤

Ahh a good old teardown, thanks Mike! Thought on the glass flow chamber manufacture, it could be extruded or drawn with the lens attached later or moulded with the cavity in place?

The Kimi Raikkonen of merch drops 😝

Nice video, thanks for sharing it :)

You can buy one of those laser modules from the manufacturer right now for only US$7,160!

Damn where do you always get those, I wish I could get my hands on that stuff.

@ciprianpopa1503

Жыл бұрын

the ebay of all things.

Interesting, I have had an eye on some of these, may make enquiries and get another toy :)

i wonder how much years of engineering goes in a product like that AND how much such a product would be today. :/ looks incredible complicated to figure out on your own.

I think the hole in the glass is made by drawing down with a dissolvable glass(?) core, you then disolve out the centre afterwards.

surface mount pillow ❤️

What do you do with the stuff after you take them apart

408nm blue-violet laser light used to be produced by frequency doubling the output of a Ti: sapphire laser. Most blue-violet diodes have an emission range of around 400-415nm, and I would imagine they hand-selected a diode with a center frequency of 408nm and used a grating to filter out the unwanted part of the spectrum.

@CraigBrideau

2 жыл бұрын

For fluorescence applications like this anything from 403 to 409 nm is often "close enough". They'll sometimes bin the diodes to get closer to 405 nm so the filters work better, but often whatever wavelength you get is what you get.

Yess!!

The tiny channel could have been drilled by an ultrafast pulse laser. With a short enough optical pulse, transparency doesn't matter any more and the laser can still ablate the material. Pulse energy is so high it rips apart the molecular structure of the material and converts it to plasma. This is only effective on the scale of micrometers though.

It looks like it's been through a war. So many scratches!

Surely the date on the laser is 13th March 2009?

@mikeselectricstuff

2 жыл бұрын

Sorry may have given the wrong date for the main unit, which was 2006

@andersvandegevel8355

2 жыл бұрын

@@mikeselectricstuff Nevertheless, thankyou for another interesting teardown of a device I'd never previously considered the existence of!

How's it going? I hope you're all well 👍

I wonder if they drill a big hole in a big piece of glass and draw it out to get the tiny hole?

I wonder if the nylon screws are to protect the PMTs from too much force on their housing? Are PMTs sensitive to mechanical forces at all?

@victortitov1740

2 жыл бұрын

no, pmts are not sensitive to static stress, apart from maybe breaking of the glass (it's a vacuum-tube device after all).

Hey Mike cool taredown would love to see you run one of the PMTs mate

@mikeselectricstuff

2 жыл бұрын

I did a vid on that a while ago : kzread.info/dash/bejne/dX2rztuyj67WiNI.html

@T2D.SteveArcs

2 жыл бұрын

@@mikeselectricstuff yeah I saw that mate👍 great video. I was hoping to bump into you at Paplwich pumping station gaussfest I know you went but I didn't see you, shame I'm sure our paths will cross at some point given common interests. Have you seen my xray transformer and TC chaos etc? I can get X-ray, CT, MRI, klystron and other high power electronics so if theres anything your after message me I'm not too far from you so easy to get stuff down to you too.. All the best Steve

I am sure you are aware, but just in case not... that PXI-6502e card alone is worth a few hundred dollars. I have a PXI chassis with built-in PC from National Instruments to use for basic test/measurement at home. It is overkill, but handy to have around. The last company I worked for was throwing it out.

Maybe the nylon screws are there to eliminate any chance of misalignment due to thermal expansion ?

@GeeWillikersMan

2 жыл бұрын

My thought was to prevent any magnetic disturbance.

@dglcomputers1498

2 жыл бұрын

@@GeeWillikersMan On the subject of magnetic disturbance, where I live (Portland, Dorset there) is supposedly a lower than usual magnethic field from the earth and as such we have Qinetq/MOD facilities for testing magnetic devices. Look at Portland Bill and you'll see the facilites near the cliff edge.

@timstephens78

2 жыл бұрын

The thermal expansion coefficient of Nylon is significantly larger than the Aluminium, so probably doesn’t help with that. I could imagine using them either to prevent damage to the PMTs or as a shock protection so that they shear if the thing is dropped and help protect the alignment of the device.

Wow! Is that amber plastic Ultem? It’s beautiful, sometimes vaping equipment is made out of it, reminds me of Jurassic Park but it reminds others of piss,

@pnjunction5689

2 жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure it is. The company I worked for makes valves that are used in dialysis machines (among other types of valves). Ultem is very suited to these types of applications since it's very rigid, high temperature resistant and also resistant against lots of cleaning fluids. And it looks very cool, too 🙂

reminds me of a quantum computer laser beams

great vid !! audio is a bit hard to understand. something overloading in the audio chain it sounds like

interesting business model, buy expensive looking stuff parts only and flog components. how atomic do you sell though? down to desoldering?

If the cell is glass, maybe the thin long hole is not drilled, but formed in place when glass is molten? Put a piece of tungesten wire, then pour glass around it, remove the wire, when glass is almost solid, then ground the glass to size. No idea if that would work. Some people say it is quartz, so that would probably not work with quartz.

@victortitov1740

2 жыл бұрын

i suppose there will be quite a bit of trouble at the "remove the wire" bit. Glass tends to stick to stuff, and then crack during cooling because of mismatched tempco.

@victortitov1740

2 жыл бұрын

thin long holes in glass are very easy to form by stretching tubes. So it might be a thick-walled tube that was stretched and then the outside is machined...

Saw this for sale and really wish I bought it for myself now :)

@daic7274

2 жыл бұрын

Set up some search filters. I often see them about for sale, also other similar equipment.

Subbed just cause.

Haha I have seen it on eBay and thought You might be bidding on this.

Jo bit a of a random question for you mike: how do you handle libraries for the pics in your projects (for things like filesystem, os, etc.)? Do you use harmony configurator or have you got your own selection of independent libs?

@mikeselectricstuff

2 жыл бұрын

Not use Harmony - used the older Microchip libs for filesystems. Most of my stuff is simple enough to not need manufacturer libraries

Hi!

It is great to see the instrument in its Dako badge... I've only seen it in the Beckman Coulter badge in our manufacturing facility... but yeah.. you... dont... drill a 0.25mm hole, would be a horrible experience....... it actually is a pretty neat process... and very simple... but sadly well within my non-disclosure agreement.... ^_^

@mikeselectricstuff

2 жыл бұрын

go on, give us a clue...

@ikocheratcr

2 жыл бұрын

Isn't that you start with a wider glass tube, with a hole, and the heat and stretch it, until you get the required hole diameter? I know that pipettes are manufactured this way. Maybe use a drill after that you make the hole "more exact"

What's the link to your ebay? :)

@mikeselectricstuff

2 жыл бұрын

seller name mikeselectricstuff

im a bit amused by that diaphragm flat spring, imagine it having four legs instead of 5 hehe..

A very interesting pile of junk left over. great video 2x👍

Well it's actually a FACS isn't it? Well fluorescence assisted cell sorter, I know FACS is company owned.

@missmaggie5292

2 жыл бұрын

It's an analyser, not a sorter. But yes flow cytometry.

woo

My washing machine is older than this expensive lab device.

@busti4552

2 жыл бұрын

But there also probably isn't a new washing machine that makes the old one so obsolete that no one needs the clothes it washes. Still. It's a shame to see parts like that go to waste.

Stout Columbian please...no cream

9:37 que? XD

Those photomultipliers are probability worth good money, eh?

@zaprodk

2 жыл бұрын

They have a limited lifespan and without knowing how many hours they have been powered, it's hard to promise any performance.

@5Perf65mm

2 жыл бұрын

For a homemade scintillation counter?

@zaprodk

2 жыл бұрын

@@5Perf65mm Then they will probably be fine.

0:49 - what in a flying DIN is this pin monstrosity? 2x6-5-3

@LostSpoke

2 жыл бұрын

Looks like an Amphenol Military-Bayonet connector to me..

720p?!!

anyone said "overengineering"? :O

@daic7274

2 жыл бұрын

You want to see what perkin elmer make for testing milk..it's about half the size of a mini and costs 750k!

fire the editer its jumpy and hard to stare at

@mechadrake

2 жыл бұрын

plot twist: Mike is his own editOR :)

A friend of mine is the owner and cook in a restaurant. He has a degenerative condition, basically he has trouble with balance, muscle control, and slurry speech. Basically from the outside it looks like he's drunk, one of the reasons he rather stays in the kitchen, as patrons in the restaurant have accused him of being drunk at the job. Is this a similar story here? Or is this video just made exclusively for people from mumble-country?

@GeckonCZ

2 жыл бұрын

Not sure. Might very well be you who has a degenerative condition if you have trouble understanding the video.

@graealex

2 жыл бұрын

@@siegfriedkettlitz6529 "Bernd"

@graealex

2 жыл бұрын

@@GeckonCZ Pretty sure I'm not the only one struggling with intelligibility, and it's not the first time someone has mentioned it. Unless it's a medical problem, I ask the creator to put more effort into the explanations.

@andymouse

2 жыл бұрын

Your comment got me wondering, as this instrument is clearly used in cellular research and perhaps counting of cell's if it would be sensitive enough to detect any inside your skull.

@eliotmansfield

2 жыл бұрын

@@graealex He’s a techie not a youtube presenter - I doubt he gives a monkey’s what you think.