Hardware

The hardware is mainly composed of different modules, interconnected for two main purposes: distributing the powers rails through all the modules and communicating each module with the main controller.

Figure 1: Diagram of the different platforms that run the system.

Broadly the system is composed of four main sections:

1. A pump system on a microlitre scale. Composed of eight stepper motors, controlling the syringe’s pumps. It is in charge of injecting and removing the fluid from the chips. This system is directly connected to a 12V power supply and controlled through the digital pins from the main controller, Arduino Mega.

2. A potentiostatic measurement system, the Rodeostat, directly connected to the microfluidic chip. It connects directly to the Arduino (Which governs the device) through Serial communication. For that purpose, the pins 26 and 31 of the P14 connector in the RodeoStat have been connected to the RX2 and TX2 pins on the Arduino Mega. The system is supplied by the 5V pin of the Arduino Mega power converter. For a more detailed description of the system, connection checks this threat where we have explained to the RodeoStat community our set up.

3. A WiFi module, designed and developed by ourselves. The system is based on the board ESP8266, broadly extended in IoT applications. It communicates to Arduino through Serial protocol through its RX3 and TX3 pins. The purpose of this module is to uploads the data sent by Arduino to an external cloud server on FireBase. You could go over all the schematic and board designs on our GitHub.

Software

1. Immobilized aptamers on a PDMS surface. In order to create an electrostatic and mechanical trap for our targeted protein, we planned to work in a PDMS environment. PDMS is a well-known manufacturing material for electronics. So we could easily integrate PDMS in our device.

2. Optical measurement sensor. The materials required to test our sensor were a 280nm UV LED emitter and an LDR. The amount of light traversing the solution was quantified by a drop in voltage across the LDR: with higher protein concentrations, higher absorption is expected together with an increased drop in voltage.

3. Microfluidics: for channeling fluids through the chip. Microfluidics allows us to move microliters of samples, minimizing the dead volumes and the waste through the chip.

4. Modular design and normalization: We needed to standardize the protocols related to hardware to reduce the number of variables involved. This would restrict the design and manufacture and help us a lot when playing with certain design parameters.

5. Enable the DIY: We had the need of developing everything in a way such that anyone, regardless his/her origin could replicate our experiments in an affordable and creative way.