Fluidigm Polaris (Part 1) - Biotech goes "Apple"? 

I read-up on the machines purpose. It was used in cancer research, where one could take up to 48 cell samples. While keeping them alive up to 24h within the sample well plate. During this each cell 'channel' can be treated by different chemicals. In the same different fluorescent dyes can be dispensed per cell, different other reagents for instance to test cells viability / metabolism. I think the easiest way to think of it, is like a human bio-reactor where different cancer treatments can be test in parallel and rapidly.

Those FLI cameras use pretty standardised control software, looks to be a custom version of their Hyperion range, would be a killer astrophotography imager on the the right telescope.

Watching someone reverse engineer with so much knowledge is the most satisfying thing. Thanks as always Mike!

Jesus £120 for all that tech, you got a right bargain there mike 😂

That slide out draw mechanisim with drop down door was pretty impressive, so was the size of that CCD. The pneauumatic manifold was art!

I used to work for a much smaller similar company. Here's the catch 22, these are low volume high cost devices without the designer wankery. Customers come to the manufacturers lab and say, "This is great, it does exactly what I want. But it's expensive and doesn't look that nice, what else can you do to make it look better?". I paraphrase but that's basically what happens. So then you go down the design rabbit hole and end up with this monstrosity, and you charge the customer twice as much but for some reason they now want to pay it. It's broken. Also Fluidigm are probably the most guilty of doing this.

Note to design group: Budget unlimited, I want it totally bespoke, make sure it looks good in the operators living room, and make sure you use the CNC division of our company a lot.

As someone not directly involved but very familiar with the industry of super-expensive super-low-volume machines: The looks do matter. In the end, these things get sold at tradeshows. Having your unit stand out on a trade show makes a big difference. On top of that, it is a way to differentiate from others. By not being 'boring grey box', you avoid being forgotten amongst the sea of grey boxes. Then there is the psychological effect. Sure, that machining might add 5k to the BOM of the machine, but after all, that is just 1% of the list price. And the users who might trial the machine do subconsciously (even if people claim the don't care - research shows they do) associate it with a fancier, better product, even if the specs are almost identical to another machine. And then if your device is in the same price bracket as another device with similar specs, you might win the contract a bit more often than if you saved a few k on machining. (that said, some of the machining here is a tad excessive, like the display - could make that a straight back with much fewer machining ops that would still look amazing, but I digress). It also helps you have a clear, recognizable style. Why is all the expensive keysight equipment black, rohde&schwarz blue-and-white, and Anritsu Green-and-white? Because that kind of corporate identity matters to your end customers. Even if all of this just sells you 10 or 20 extra machines, on a machine you might sell a few hundred of, that makes a difference. On top of that, you might get away with a few percent higher sales price, which easily offsets any additional cost of the machining. And as a final fact: A lot of these product lines start with startups. Those startups have over-eager (young, fresh grad) designers and engineers who are just excited and lose track of the bigger picture.

That image sensor is massive, hopefully it's a decent modern one. The Windows UI looks really neat too, seems they used all the modern UI tech which was pretty much dropped right away. It looks very much like the Windows Phone style.

Did they hire the same designer as Juicero? While I'd usually refer to the light effect as "breathing", "throbbing" seems particularly apt for the amount of wankery going on with this device.

That, IIRC, is the first time I've heard Mike 'WOW' or 'just a magnificent thing'.

I absolutely love these types of videos!!! You are awsome mike!

it was only used when ever the price was mentioned in front of it

Juicero Biotech LLC

I thought this thing is the size of a shoe box.. until the tiny hand came in :D

So well said about the "Applezation" of some super high end specific hardware

That door definitely should have been brought to the attention of Boeing's design team.

Love it when Mike gets a bit pissed at the designers! You’re not wrong 😉

Epic teardown of an epic piece of machinery!

Great video.. very interesting.. looking forward to part 2

Let's gooooooo! It was nice meeting you on the Hackaday conf in Berlin. Hope this video is about what you where showing there!

Looks very Theranos

"Apple level of aesthetic wankery" and markup.

Yup the MFPs are single use consumable parts. One way around the 1000 bucks each is to use a photoresin machine and dxf files to create your own. ❤

This has to be one of the most impressive things you've torn down!

There's something so apple about designing something completely bespoke only for it to be worse, or simply unnecessary.😮

Love your evaluation 🤣 Looking orward to seeing the light source and camera!

Thanks Mike! Good recommendations at the end as well, wonder if the makers could share some thoughts on that. Not the case for this one but sometimes companies have to make a stupid design choice such that the integration steps can be verified.

It all ways looks like the engines just got a no limit credit card and little by little went insane in luxury mode.

Maybe they picked up the people form Juicero after their juicer failed

Just from seeing it before it reminds me of Theranos' Edison prototype. That already was very much working that "Apple" vein. With that, this or a Juicero we're seeing what happens when your design and product costs are unconstrained.

Teardown time is my favorite time! Nice one Mike👍

Adapt that lovely big sensor into a large format or medium format camera.

That optical block is probably made from Invar, as it has almost zero TC, so the focus does nor change with temperature, and also will nor change with the top being cooled and the base being heated.

Small valves rely on contact pressure, they probably replace the wiring section to a valve with the valve, so that they only are used once. That way the initial wipe keeps the connection gas tight, and it will not vibrate loose. Yes pneumatics dept and electronics did not talk much to each other, or they had a massive delay on laying out that pneumatic logic board, so did not actually know until late on in the design as to where they were going, how many they would need, and an exact design, as they probably were iterating through designs, trying to get it to both be manufacturable with some sort of yield (likely they had a 50% loss in testing, which is fine if you are charging $400k, make around a dozen a year, and the fluidic assembly takes 2 days to bond together, and another day to pass or fail test, so you always have a stock for testing) that is acceptable and not going to delay any deliveries.

For something with a lot of impressive engineering, there is also a lot of absolutely atrocious engineering. I have a manufacturing background, and those giant monolithic aluminum components are absolutely insane. You're probably looking a close to $1500 in aluminum billets for those two parts you showed at the end, and then throwing away most of it with $4000 worth of machining. It wouldn't have been as elegant, but breaking those components up into several smaller pieces that were bolted or welded together would have seen considerable cost and manufacturing time savings. Couple that with the side panels milled from aluminum sheet, and it's just craziness. "Spare no expense" doesn't mean "design this purposely to be unnecessarily expensive to build". The whole thing screams "biotech engineering intern designed". Bunch of very intelligent, creative college kids, without real-world engineering experience, being told they have no budget constraints. I just cannot see a seasoned mechanical engineer making those pieces out of solid aluminum billets like that, even with an unlimited budget. It's just so wasteful.

Equipment like that is made to look like that to impress the "suits" when they come on a tour through the lab....

On one hand, perhaps some of the design is a bit wanky and overdone. But it looks like the UI has had at least a little bit of thought put into making it nice to use, and look decent. That alone puts it leagues above most specialized equipment where the UIs are generally ugly and unnecessarily obtuse (and still running on Windows XP)

This guy and thunderfoot are are my RU-vid heros!

Definitely some very interesting stuff going on inside hat machine. 400k is something! I'm kinda envious about how you're able to lay your hands on high-end scientific and medical gear, but now that I saw how Rinoa got a high-performance liquid chromatograph that was no longer used and just sitting there in a basement in some lab, everything is possible. I love the fluidics part of it, it's extremely complex. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever... maybe not that for ever now that you discombobulated it. Definitely some wonderful engineering went into it. Agreed on using a PCB as a backplane for solenoid valves. It'd be so much more elegant his way. I can imagine Dave Jones aesthetically wanking over the die-cast aluminium parts, haha! 16:57 who even does check flags using case-sensitive string comparison like that? Totally unpythonic.

Thanks for the video, it's really interesting to see these teardowns of very specialised technical equipment. Probably not cheap (for you) to buy either.

it's always a treat when you upload, thanks for showing us this! so.... the machine costs $29.99+s/h, the tests cost $125,000 each? haha

Juicero is what comes to mind. The yield is quite similar as well.

There are similar instruments that actually use 300mm-wafer image sensors, a single sensor per wafer. Designed by companies such as Caeleste in Belgium.

That manifold!! But agree why they just didn't add a pcb for the valves

The heaters were probably made by Heatron in Leavenworth, KS which is up in the Kansas City area. They are one of the largest producers of thick film heaters.

A bit Apple-y yes, but unlike most mainstream Apple stuff, these guy did put a fair bit of engineering effort in that benefits the customer.

Awesome! Its a dream to make project of machine like this one

The code for that script... spills wonders on its creator. They really spent the money on looks, but the parts that does the actual job, seems to have been second thought.

Good score, find these recent devices really interesting. More $100k+ devices that can be dismantled for cheap the better!

I heard "which is designed to extract souls from a sample then treat them with a number of different chemicals"... This is gonna be good :D

16:58 That script is python 2. If you have write access to it (for example if you pull the drive and put it in another pc) you could rewrite a section of it pretty easily and get it to dump the passwords or even just execute the maintenance mode directly.

"Apple-level aesthetic wankery" really got me! :) Unbelievable enclosure, man.

I think it appropriate that the external case and monitor should somewhat be aligned with the internals. Would it make sense to have the external body/interface be minimal (read:cheap/standard dull) when it is

Ah! Reminds me of the failed attempt from eddify, in a different yet also niche field (NDT) to do something similar. Plus, they even added subscriptions to use the hardward, and have it bricked if you dont renew :)

I love engineering undertaken without the control of the accounts department. It looks like they could halve the bill of materials without effecting the functionality. Good score Mike. Thanks.

this is great, I can''t believe you got that for 120 squid

Spotted a Qioptiq logo there, makers of very high end commercial and military-spec optical stuff. I guess all the fancy visual LED and metal machining is for when the venture capitalists get a visit to the latest company they spun out. They can see how their money was spent!

That manifold is beautiful. Get it to Lookmumnocomputer to make a miniature whistling pipe organ from it! Great vid Mike. Looking forward to the camera exploration

What happened to your poor camera, loads of blobs that obscure details in the image. At least you seemed to have cleaned the lens later on.

never underestimate the ability of C-suite types and potential investors to be impressed by rows of shiny equipment that they have no idea what it does. the shinier the better, obviously. squirrel!

There is a supplier for Electric and Phneumatic PCB near Hamburg. Saw their stuff at the SPS show in Nuremberg in 2016. So it is available, but the number of layers in this manifold is extreme. Although as you say a simple thin multilayer, or even a flexible foil PCB could have done a better job than the extremely expensive wire loom. But looking at the overall concept of this machine, there was little mind given to optimization. At a price of 400k there was surely a fair amout of profit in this. So, inguessbthete is a lot of scope to bring that kind of device to a much lower price point by a less lavish implemebtation an the application of a little judicious production optimization. I remember seeing well plates at a Medica show in Duesseldorf in the early naughties, but I never saw a machine that drove them. How did you find sth like that in the first place?

Clear cam lens 😮‍💨

14:45 - what a takedown! 😆

I wonder how they design those microfluidic stacks. Perhaps they just use regular PCB layout software with special footprints, extract the different layers from the gerbers, edit some stuff manually and use those for machining the plates before bonding?

To be fair, I have worked with several CPOs that thought "It has bluetooth" is a reason to buy something.

Next video coming soon? :)

The heavy frame maybe made from cast stainless steel.

Heck of an image sensor. It would be interesting to see what that is capable of. Shame there's probably not a lot that can be done with it otherwise without a whole bunch of very custom work. But you can definitely see where all that ungodly weight came from. All that metalwork for the optics and whatnot was pretty wild to see. Though I can safely say that the external case just looked stupid to me. Probably an absolute crapton of machining to make it look like a grey block cut out from a bigger chunk of something by someone using a one inch drill bit. Strange.

You should talk with @LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER about making a teeeeny tiny pipe organ out of this thing. Or rather an electric accordion.

Ahh, the Polaris.. 🎶 Hey, signal strange. You're lookin' happily deranged... 🎵

"Wankery". Precisely.

Would be fun to make an anamatronic with all those valves.

Definitely resin printing behind those translucent fluid manifolds. Health insurance markups & a quantity of 1 would make it cost 1/6 of a house. Guess we'll have to buy $400k of mandatory health insurance & the net investment income tax won't be tracking inflation.

WhOOOoool The tech for that age 💎

Where's part 2 🥲

Probably not relevant here, but after working in a hospital in a none clinical role I have seen the criminal exploitation of patients by pharmaceutical and medical device suppliers. It is staggeringly. I would include consultants as well. Healthcare is an aggressive industry targeting people who are frightened. Money is there to be extracted and they are experts at that. "We're all about the patient" is a phrase often said

love the purple LEDs nice change from blue. I am taking the pee, its way over engineered and you could cut the cost of manufacturing just by making it look like the average bit of tech. Interesting video 2x👍

👍👍👍

Better to have biotech going "apple" then apple going biotech ...

Wow they really gilded the lily on that one, for no good reason. Seems like a mechanical engineer had a wet dream or something on this thing. The expense paid for some of it's features is really comical (like how they did all that just for a fancy door movement).

There exist many entities that thrive on generous government grants by finding ways to spend ever more money on such things. In such cases the high price becomes a welcome feature.

One can only imagine what kind of test substance you accidentally squirted all over the camera lens...

"Apple level aesthetic wankery of this": It's OK for social signalling purposes in that a company that cares about the appearance of their products is likely to employ well rewarded, highly professional engineers.

There are green PCBs in there. Cant be from apple (:

The dirty lens is really aggravating my ocd.

„aesthetic wankery“ 😏 Oh well, in medtech there is nearly no limit to the cost of the outer surfaces, especially if they have to comply with GLP regulations. I‘m slightly surprised at the uneven surface outside as it doesn’t seem to be beneficial for cleaning. Have yet to watch the whole series but I assume they‘re using the massive case to keep the inner temperature within a defined range compared to the temps in the lab it would be installed in. 400k is not a surprising price to me at all, yes that outer finish is for the fuzzy feeling in this case. The microfluid consumables are single use and they will be the main cash cow next to the sensor. Fascinating stuff, don‘t get to see this every day.

Looks like it was designed by former audiophile equipment company dudes 😅

"Wankery" is such beatiful and - in these cases - useful word!

Makes you wonder how much of the $400K pays for the marketing wankery? Give me the purely functional version.

Why wouldn't you want a special system that costs a shitload of money look nice? Would you rather see the system shipped in a bog standard PC case and require you to bring your own monitor as well? Or is the expectation that this would somehow (considerably) bring the price down? I don't think so...

This reminds me of why I usually loathe working with industrial designers, especially the ones on the artsy end of the skill spectrum. Grumble, grumble.

400k and the touchscreen barely knows what a touch is

apart from the overbuilt case the rest of the engineering seems like it was valid. Even the heavy aluminium case may have provided extra damping. the machining of it though, wankery ))). I wonder why it was never used ?

Apple level aesthetic wankery. Classic.

@mikeselectricstuff - well they are stupid. and we are more clever. .. 😀 thanks Mike. Keep up the work and you really are gold dust in a ocean of YT excrement. Thanks 🙂

No wonder it was 400.000 US$, just imagine how many people with specialised knowledge were engaged in developing, designing and building these things and its not like they sold in millions.

I just hope this wasn't bought with NHS funds. Their suppliers already regard them as the ultimate cash cow

Ha the tray was doing a Bob Marley 🤡 Mike please next time clean your camera lens :(

No wonder it was $400k. Completely over built. An engineer/designers wet dream. Lol