A hobbyist built his own blood centrifuge from a Raspberry Pi Pico and a drone motor because lab hardware was too expensive

[AJStyles]

Thomas Nguyen ran into a problem familiar to anyone who has ever tried to do serious lab work outside of an institutional setting, needing a centrifuge capable of separating T cells from blood samples but finding that capable commercial units simply were not affordable for an independent project. Rather than giving up on the work or trying to scrape together access to someone else's lab equipment, he built the whole thing himself from parts that would look more at home in a drone hobbyist's workshop than a biology lab.

The build centres on a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller handling the control logic, paired with an A2212 brushless motor, the exact kind commonly used in small drones and RC aircraft, driven through a 30 amp electronic speed controller of the type any FPV drone builder would instantly recognise. A 3D printer produced the custom housing and rotor components needed to actually hold and spin 15 millilitre conical tubes, the standard vessel size for this kind of blood sample separation work, at speeds sufficient to achieve genuine separation of blood components.

Safety was clearly a serious consideration rather than an afterthought bolted on at the end, which matters enormously for a device spinning fluid samples at high speed. Nguyen incorporated an MPU-6050 vibration sensor specifically to detect dangerous imbalance conditions and trigger an automatic shutdown before things go wrong, alongside an infrared sensor dedicated to monitoring rotational speed accurately in real time. That combination of components gives the fixed angle centrifuge design a genuine safety net that a purely improvised build without any sensing hardware would be missing entirely.

The project is still in its early prototype validation phase rather than ready for actual blood samples just yet. Nguyen's plan is to first confirm safe operation and verify the device can actually achieve proper fluid separation using safer test liquids like dyed water and glycerol, a sensible staged approach that lets him iron out any mechanical or safety issues before introducing real biological material into the equation.

The project's own framing captures the appeal of this kind of build perfectly, with Nguyen putting it plainly that sometimes the lab hardware you need is the lab hardware you build yourself. It is a nice encapsulation of a broader maker culture trend where hobbyists increasingly refuse to treat expensive specialised scientific equipment as permanently out of reach, instead applying the same drone and 3D printing parts that have become cheap and accessible over the past decade to problems that would once have required an institutional budget to even attempt.

Building A DIY Centrifuge For Blood Processinghackaday.com