Note: I also helped develop poseidon The poseidon system was explicitly designed with ease of assembly in mind. If you look at the build videos [1] you'll see

Note: I also helped develop poseidon The poseidon system was explicitly designed with ease of assembly in mind. If you look at the build videos [1] you'll see that assembly of the entire system (3 pumps + microscope station) takes less than an hour and requires just pliers and screwdrivers. The importance of ease of assembly was a lesson that we took from assembling the miniDrops microfluidics station [2] developed specifically for one kind of experiment (dropSeq) [3]. The miniDrops is very good at what it does but assembly was somewhat cumbersome: it required ordering a custom PCB, specialized parts only available from one vendor (whom I had to nag over the phone to send me a quote!) and assembly of the device itself took 10-20h. Not every kind of equipment can be made as easy to source and assemble as we did with poseidon, but we really think that keeping this at the front of your mind can make or break the adoption of a piece of open source hardware. This is especially true in the context of biology laboratories, where many people are not what you could call "hackers" or "makers" and will be immediately put off by a daunting assembly process. [1] https://pachterlab.github.io/poseidon/hardware https://pachterlab.github.io/poseidon/hardware [2] https://metafluidics.org/devices/minidrops/ https://metafluidics.org/devices/minidrops/ [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-0265 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-0265