Lab Automation with LEGO®
Research instruments built from toy bricks, for a twentieth of the price.
Laboratory automation is gated by price, bench space and the assumption that an instrument does one job forever. We built three research tools out of LEGO® Technic™ and MINDSTORMS® EV3 parts: a syringe pump, an orbital shaker and a microcentrifuge. They share 384 pieces. Build them one at a time and the whole set costs under $83.
Then we made them do real work. We synthesized calcium carbonate microparticles using the brick-built machines and the commercial instruments side by side, and the results came out comparably. The shaker went further than parity: because its motion is programmed rather than dialed in, we could write shake profiles the commercial unit has no way to produce, and reach particles it could not make.
The argument is sustainability as much as cost. A commercial centrifuge is a centrifuge until it is landfill. A pile of bricks is a centrifuge this week and a syringe pump next week, which is exactly the property that makes LEGO® worth taking seriously outside a classroom.
Then it went back to the classroom on purpose. We ran a three-day workshop for middle schoolers who assembled all three machines, used them to automate the chemistry, and finished by redesigning their equipment for jobs we had not assigned. The chemistry drew the strongest engagement. The building humbled the students who had never met a Technic™ beam, which is a finding worth publishing rather than hiding.
Assembly instructions and timelapse builds for all three machines are behind the doors above.
Syringe pump
A motor drives a threaded rod that advances a syringe plunger at a set speed, which is how you add a reagent slowly and evenly instead of dumping it in. The commercial version costs hundreds of dollars and does one thing.
Orbital shaker
A platform driven in a circular orbit keeps a reaction mixed and suspended. Because ours is programmed rather than dialed in, the shake profile itself becomes an experimental variable, and that turned out to matter: custom profiles gave us particle characteristics the commercial shaker could not reach.
Microcentrifuge
Spin a sample fast enough and the solids collect at the bottom, which is how you separate a product from the liquid it formed in. This is the smallest of the three builds and the fastest to put together.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.