I want to make a custom UV curing station for a well plate.
Some design requirements:
365 nm wavelength
At least 128 by 86 mm but as close to that as possible
Programmatic control (could be on/off but intensity modulation would be even better)
My basic idea is to use this light from amazon and some sort of programmable relay or power switch to control whether its on or off.
I also looked at something like this: but I’m sure it costs more and I’d need something to programmatically control the voltage to the power pin.
Another consideration is safety and the configuration of the light. Presumably plastic blocks UV in many cases, so if I put the light shining up through the well plates, it might get blocked and also a lid would be required to prevent people from getting UV in their eyes. If you make it face down, that solves those issues but then it makes it more difficult to have a robot place the well plate and the UV (facing down) over the well plate.
Has anyone implemented or seen anything like this?
I have a Kasa KP401 that I’ve used and can let you try out. It supports MQTT, so you can control it with Python. It has a dimming function as well, though it depends on the controlled device whether or not that would apply / be useful.
One of the issues I had was that it consumed a large amount of data for some reason. This was a while back, maybe 8 months ago, and may have just been a firmware issue that is now updated.
EDIT: you also need to ensure that for whatever device you’re powering, it doesn’t require additional steps such as pressing buttons, which complicates things. Otherwise, if it’s a manual device that requires a button click to turn on, “hacking” the control interface or something similar is required, and using the on/off switch may no longer be necessary.
I love Sterling’s suggestion, which I will also try (at home first).
The light intensity and uniformity matter a lot. The expensive solutions are usually powerful and carefully measured/calibrated.
If the well plate (I’m assuming polystyrene) does not transmit UV light (ChatGPT says <10% transmittance for 365nm), then it sounds like the light position should be face down.
You mention you use a robot to place the well plate. Could you also use the robot to move a UV curing module above the well plate during curing, and
then move it elsewhere when not in use?
If you buy an off-the-shelf UV lamp and want to do “intensity modulation”, what about changing the distance between the source and the target? Alternativity, there’s probably a resistor on the part that you could swap to change the intensity as well (or maybe you could add more resistance), but that would require more work.
For safety, are you able to create an enclosure for this curing setup? If not a full enclosure, maybe just acrylic panels between the UV source and the user?
Design wise, I agree it should go face down. The only thing I don’t like about moving the UV light is that it might be heavy and it has a cord.
Currently the design we have is to have it like an oven with a tray that comes in and out. We don’t have an exact mechanism for that opening/closing but could be screw threads.
Also kthchow recommended using this process for controlling the switching action.
Maybe mount a UV lamp on a boom arm to help with the support and cable routing?
Could you repurpose a desk lamp an mount your UV light where the original lamp would be?
Also just ran across something about using pulse width modulation (PWM) to do intensity modulation for LEDs. That might be an option too.
My only concern is that the boom arm could take up a lot of space, we want to do this inside an opentrons, for example. Ideally taking up no more than 1 deck slot.
I’m not very familiar with UV curing devices, but just a quick idea: If you happen to have a UV lighting board unit that fits an OpenTrons slot, using programmable LEGO (like a door opening mechanism, sliding or flipping) could be an easy solution to move the lighting unit from the curing module slot to the well plate slot. However, the weight and power requirements of the UV light might still be a concern.