DIY Biochemical Scanner From a Hacked CD Drive

holy_calamity writes "Turns out hacking two extra light sensors into a CD drive can turn it into a lab scanner to read the results of high-accuracy immunoassays used to detect disease markers or pathogens, New Scientist reports. The drive proved able to detect pesticides at concentrations as low as 0.02 micrograms per liter."

let me guess

[HalifaxRage]

Let me guess.... MacGyver happened to haev a paper clip and a rubber band beside the computer.

Re:

[Divebus]

This sounds like Martha Stewart.

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[somersault]

What does Hillary have to do with it?

It's a well known fact...

[SnoopJeDi]

Viruses can be transmitted via CD.

Don't trust strange CDs.

[/PSA]

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[p0tat03]

Always put your CD in a sleeve? :P

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[LrdDimwit]

Only if you ... well, you know. Is that an audio jack in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? I mean, seriously -- just because there's a hole there doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Too bad.

[KGIII]

I would have liked to get more information. The whole "DIY" seems a bit misleading but a fun story to read. Much thanks.

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[schweinhund]

I agree. The DIY bit was misleading.

It would be great to get some schematics and other data on this.

Apparently some mod thought you shouldn't have spoken poorly of the Holy Article!

Biological samples

[LiquidCoooled]

I'm sure some people have already been using CD drives with biological samples smeared across the disks.

Mental note: never rent porn dvds.

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[terrence.donnelly]

Back when I worked at Best Buy some guy returned a DVD player with the most god awful transvestite porn in it (obviously covered in biological samples). We called him back and he denied having any affiliation. So we told his wife.

Rooted

[Chyeld]

Sadly, the drive was later mistaken as a normal CD drive and one of the researchers attempted to play the collection of Sony CD's on it. Now the drive refuses to do anything, claiming the pesticides are patented and trademarked and detecting them would be a violation of someone's Intellectual Property.

Wonder if this is related to Discode?

[ahfoo]

Discode was a project to do an "open source" bio hardware device that sounds very similar to this. The project was going on under the guidance of a UCSD professor and got a lot of write up about three years ago but it seemed to slowly disappear over the years.

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[methano]

You're right. Something like this has been reported before. Based on some of the later shenanigans of one of the authors of that work (not the UCSD prof), most people familiar with the work now consider it not reliable. This stuff sounds a little suspicious too.

No, not quite.

[Applekid]

From TFA:

However, Corran believes that the Spanish team's procedure needs to be developed further. "They still do part of the assay in a normal plate. Until the whole thing can be done on a CD it doesn't have a great technical advantage."

Meaning there is no Hacked CD Drive Biochemical Scanner, there's a Hacked CD Drive component to a Biochemical Scanning System.

I'd be willing to give up my last 5.25" bay if I could use it to give me the secret cheeto powder recipe.

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[Dunbal]

Meaning there is no Hacked CD Drive Biochemical Scanner, there's a Hacked CD Drive component to a Biochemical Scanning System.

      Ahh, but for an extra $1499 we can throw in the "centrifuge" component as well. Now scan AND centrifuge your samples at the same time!

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[Ajehals]

Is that for simultaneous biological weapon production and uranium enrichment? I'll take one.

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[morgan_greywolf]

I'd be willing to give up my last 5.25" bay if I could use it to give me the secret cheeto powder recipe.

Wha? That. I've got that! It's right here. You tak 3/4..^)&)(%^%&*%*$*9698y7few-090-9*)(

NO CARRIER

Re:No, not quite.

[jimstapleton]

Yes, but would you be willing to give up eating Cheetos to know the recipie?

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[mrzaph0d]

once he found out what's really in them? probably.

Missing the Point

[ivormi]

However, Corran believes that the Spanish team's procedure needs to be developed further. "They still do part of the assay in a normal plate. Until the whole thing can be done on a CD it doesn't have a great technical advantage."

I think he's missing the initial point here. The point is to reduce the overall cost of being capable of running the test, not in vastly increasing the efficiency of running a massive batch of tests this way. Certainly there's downstream potential for it, but by itself, this provides testing capabilities to a much wider set of labs.

Re:Missing the Point

[kebes]

The point is to reduce the overall cost of being capable of running the test, not in vastly increasing the efficiency of running a massive batch of tests this way. Certainly there's downstream potential for it...

Actually there is already research being done in that regard. Some research groups are experimenting with building microfluidic [wikipedia.org] systems on compact-disks. The spinning of the disk generates a centrifugal force that acts as the 'pump' for the device, driving fluid through stages. You can even have special valves in your device, and by changing the rotation speed of the drive, you progressively move the fluid from stage to stage.

Then the CD laser can be used as a detection mechanism at different locations along the disk. Also you can obviously run multiple experiments at once, since as the disk spins the laser passes from one fluid channel to the next.

It's a rather cool idea to use commodity CD-drives for these high-tech assays. I'm not aware of a good review of these experiments, but here are two papers on this subject:
Siyi Lai, Shengnian Wang, Jun Luo, L. James Lee, Shang-Tian Yang, and Marc J. Madou "Design of a Compact Disk-like Microfluidic Platform for Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay [acs.org]" Analytical Chemistry, 76 (7), 1832 -1837, 2004. doi 10.1021/ac0348322 [doi.org]

Horacio Kido, Miodrag Micic, David Smith, Jim Zoval, Jim Norton and Marc Madou "A novel, compact disk-like centrifugal microfluidics system for cell lysis and sample homogenization" Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces Volume 58, Issue 1, 1 July 2007, Pages 44-51 doi: doi:10.1016/j.colsurfb.2007.03.015 [doi.org]

Why so expensive?

[SQLServerBen]

The real question is, if the laboratory machines are using more or less the same technology as the CD drives, why do the actual lab machines cost so much more? From TFA, the machine this replaces costs 30-60k Euro, compared to 15 Euro for a generic CD drive.

Re:Why so expensive?

[Colin Smith]

Quality...

 

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[djradon]

Not to mention that CD-ROM drives are produced on a huge scale by an industry with lots of competition.

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[eli pabst]

Quality...

Having actually worked with laboratory equipment, that should be modded funny.

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[db32]

The answer is simple. Demand. Lets assume the size of the mfg plants, number of employees, and so on are the same for 2 companies, one making the lab equipment one making generic CD drives. I think it is safe to assume that the lab machine is going to be more expensive on materials alone, but not by the amount in the price difference between a generic CD drive and it.

How many generic CD drives do you think the company can expect to sell vs lab machines. You can find at least 1 if not multiple generic

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[sholden]

Except that a third party company could buy generic CD drives and convert them. I doubt the conversion process would cost 30k euro, if the people who made this one can do it then it can probably be done with standard equipment possibly mostly by manual human work (if demand it so low).

More likely reasons:

* The lab machine is more accurate and more importantly calibrated and tested to be so.
* The lab machine passed a bunch of standards to be approved for use on something a generic CD drive isn't.
* The lab ma

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[db32]

Yeah...you buy your lab equipment for your hospital where people make life and death decisions from the guy that built the stuff by harvesting parts in his garage :P Honestly I imagine buying those drives for parts is probably more expensive than paying for the components they actually need out of those drives fresh and not having to convert things. If you are going to rebuild an engine do you buy a new car to get the gaskets you need?

That said I am sure your reasons are no small factor, but if every ho

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[blincoln]

I imagine buying those drives for parts is probably more expensive than paying for the components they actually need out of those drives fresh and not having to convert things.

Actually, this is almost certainly not the case. Economies of scale have given us dirt cheap CD-ROM drives. You can buy several models - brand new - at e.g. New Egg for about US$12. You would probably pay about that much for just the status LED, open/close button, and motors at e.g. Frys. This project benefits additionally from the me

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[db32]

I imagine the guys who manufacture medical equipment get better deals than going to Frys. I would imagine that the company building the lab equipment would be able to get the same price on components as the company building CDroms. If your business model is "instead of buying components we will go to a retail outlet and strip things for parts" you are going to fail miserably. I am talking about two companies here, not a company that makes CDroms and a guy that builds lab equipment in his garage.

Your po

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[blincoln]

It's not just going to Frys or getting them direct from the manufacturer. It's how many you buy in quantity. Companies that make CD-ROM drives buy their parts in much greater numbers than companies that make medical spectrograph gear, so they get them for much cheaper.
As other people have pointed out, the DIY method is not meant as a replacement for hospitals that can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or even thousands of dollars) on a single piece of gear. It's intended for people like those in

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[Gr8Apes]

They used to be, go back and check the $5K+ price on Optical/WORM drives back in the late 80s early 90s, then adjust for inflation. Then realize that for $5K you got essentially a 1-off machine that could not interoperate with any other drive, even of it's own make. If you wrote enough disks, you couldn't even read the first disks, because of head alignment wear.

I know some folks who would have paid multiples of the initial $5K cost just to get back at their data, and some did. Others just burned 50 disks a

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably not quite that simple. In fact, the article itself mentioned the purpose-built machines are faster (which means they probably inherently cost more and certainly are worth slightly more for that feature). I've got a suspicion they might be more accurate too, which is going to add to the cost, too.

Not to mention, this still won't be a $50 instrument. A couple hundred dollars by the time you perform low-production rate modifications with the extra sensors, and presumably a premium to cover the

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[Ajehals]

I just bought a 250Gb Drive for £25, £0.25/Gb - Mental, and to think that I thought a 4Gb drive was ridiculous size wise and really was price wise.

Cue the 4Gb? When I was a lad we had an abacus with one bead, it cost a years wages and we were happy...... comments

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[sugar and acid]

The same reason very specialized solutions often cost a lot. It's the development cost and small manufacturing tooling and low run production costs that drive up the price, but with a flip side of small but lucrative market that wants these products and is willing to pay the necessary fee to have them delivered in a turnkey setup.

Get the right tool for the job.

[ramk13]

Because laboratory machines are tools built for the job and last a comparatively long time... I've never had any qualms about paying $100-200 for a magnetic stir plate in a lab, because I know the stir plate will last the length of my professors tenure and then some. There are some stir plates in our building from the 60s and 70s. They'll stir 24/7 for literally years without stopping or overheating and it won't stop because you spill something on them. Granted a stirplate is pretty simple compared to most

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[DerCed]

Because there is a lot of costly R&D involved in inventing, developing and testing such devices. Also companies mostly provide very good support in case of malfunctions, as well as general help..

You can buy a car from Mercedes, but you can also mount a little engine on your bicycle... You get the point.

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[Anarchitect_in_oz]

Let's not forget Assurance/Insurance cost in that equation.

No one but good tasted is harmed by playing your JT cd's.
Someone maybe if the hacked CD player medical device gives a false negative.

Your playing for the Equipment produces to cover their asses.

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[Sentax]

Go buy a CD drive and then do what they do... the cost is the software that analyzes all the information given by the drive to determine what chemical it may be.

On a side note, this isn't new, I watched a special on this like 2 years ago on Discovery channel. Even in the special it stated that the magic is the software.

and then...

[JeanBaptiste]

you can hack your DVD drive [slashdot.org] to destroy the pathogens

The question on everyone's minds...

[thatskinnyguy]

How much paper machete and duct tape was used in the construction?

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[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean paper mâché [wikipedia.org], not paper machete [wikipedia.org].

Making a big knife out of paper kinda defeats the purpouse.

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[thatskinnyguy]

Damn this Firefox spell-checker!

Not too surprised...

[EricR86]

I once hacked open a old CD drive to take a look at the laser and inner workings inside. I'm no optics expert, but what I found was that the laser portion of the device was essentially a tiny interferometer as far as I could tell (surprise surprise). Since you can use interferometry to measure such things as differences in wavelength within fractions of a nanometer - couldn't this technique be applied to biochemical applications as well?

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[EricR86]

You may think that's supposed to be a joke, but CD lasers are really dangerous. They're labeled safe (Class I ?) on the CD drive because they're inside a closed space. If you remove it from its enclosure it suddenly becomes a very unsafe device to use, especially when you expose the laser. CD lasers are IR, which means your eyes will not blink, and save you, from your eye focusing a collimated beam on the back of your retina. You would quickly go blind. And all this would take place in a fraction of a seco

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[kuruptacus]

duh.

explanation

[Iron Corona]

0.02 micrograms per liter

What does this mean exactly? 0.02 micrograms per litre of what?

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[James McP]

It's a density function so it doesn't matter of what. 0.02 micograms/liter is equivalent to 0.00002 micrograms/cc

Converting to "parts per million" does require attention to "liter of what" as molecule size becomes a factor, just as "percent mass" would also require the "of what" to know the mass of the solvent.

The "of what" would depend on what the source of the sample was: ground water, soil, air, urine, blood. 0.02 micrograms of pesticide per liter of soil may be a non-issue while 0.02 micograms of pes

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[Iron Corona]

Well then is this number meaningless? Presumably you'll be trying to determine the amount of "disease markers or pathogens" in a given substance. It doesn't indicate how useful the device would be in finding these things in ground water, soil, air, urine, blood etc.

Re:explanation

[James McP]

It isn't meaningless, but it is a context-less number. Let's try this a different way.

Bob the scientist goes and gets samples from the air, soil, water, and fish at a site. His sensor can go down to 0.02 micrograms of pesticide per liter of sample. When he checks the results he finds the sensor found no pesticide in the air, 0.05 micrograms/L of pesticide in the soil, 0.02 ugrams/L in the water, and 0.15 ugrams/L in the fish.

The context provides the useful part of the data. The soil shows significant levels of pesticide, indicating it was the area directly sprayed. The air sample shows no pesticide to the limit of the sensor so the spraying was done more than a few hours ago. The water is somewhat contaminated but also at the limit of the sensor so it probably isn't that bad as long as there is rain to further dilute the compound. However the fish sample is several times higher than the water or soil sample, implying the pesticide has been used repeatedly and that the ecosystem may start suffering damage.

If the sensor was limited to detecting 10 micograms/L then you couldn't detect the pesticide prior to visible symptoms in the wildlife. By having a more sensitive sensor you have greater lead time to finding problems. For forensic-type activities, it also means it is easier to track down the point source of the pollutant.

Re:explanation plus a bit

[Anonymous Coward]

0.02ug/L of protein is what I got from reading the article.

The array can have 300,000 spots of different proteins.

Each spot is at a fraction of a uL volume. The sample must be at 0.02ug/L to be detected.

This is a huge step over commercial applications for a variety of reasons.

First array density

For example I do nucleic acid microarrays (even though the example in the article is protein arrays). We can look at ~30000 samples per array, so the people in the article are able to assess an order of magnitude mor

Beyond Tomorrow

[sarahbau]

I saw something on Beyond Tomorrow on the Science channel several months ago where they were doing this with unmodified drives. It was all done in the software. In the example they tested to see if something was anthrax or not. I can't seem to find anything about it except for references to the show. I believe it was episode 23 if it's available anywhere.

neat

[kuruptacus]

who knew those things were as useful as tricorders? "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a crazy DIY geek!" (said lovingly toward diy geeks...)

Ten to one...

[LM741N]

It will eventually be used for illicit drug testing.

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[LM741N]

They can test hair, clothing, you name it. And pee eventually evaporates and leaves solid behind.

Sounds like a CD operation...

[davidsyes]

But, will is spin a new yarn?

The REAL question...

[SplatMan_DK]

Actually, the REAL question is...

WILL IT BLEND?

;-)

- Jesper