Is anyone familiar with DIY repair of the Typhoon (Amersham/GE/molecular dynamics) lasers canners? Can't find any hints online. Our current issue with it is a faulty shutter cable.
BTW, in case anyone is stuck with a "firmware" error in the older machine (ours is 2007 and is beyond repair), one can open the PC box (in 2007, it was a Pentium III) and connect a VGA monitor and a keyboard to the PC board, and read the error code that comes up during start up. Ours shows a shutter cable problem, which is where I am stuck now.
In the past, I have replaced faulty fans, and the fast stage drive belt. All of these "problems" were quoted by GE to be fixed for between 5K and 15K, at which point the machine has been abandoned, and I've been fixing issues with it for the last few years on case by case basis.
Was your cable issue resolved? I haven't been able to get the keyboard to type commands, did you? Our issue is Lon driver (Echelon / lontalk) not loading so no communication to the Shutter / Filter modules.
Nope, no progress on this, the machine is abandoned for now. The only possible solution seems to find an engineer who is familiar with these specific machines and knows the ins and outs, and can source used parts. For now, we got a full-frame consumer camera (Sony alpha7) with an extended IR range for taking snapspots of gels. We can see 1ul of 100 nM Cy3-tagged protein easily with it, using UV light for excitation. Also got a 520 LED array; that may improve the sensitivity. In the future, I was also going to build a laser scanner myself using a CNC laser engraver platform (plenty of those on ebay and aliexpress), as a part of an MSc or a BSc project.
Thanks for the response, good to know you are finding a way. I intend to get to the bottom of this, although GE abandoned support for our ten year old Trio as soon as it was five years old, so my chances may be pretty slim. I wish I was a lawyer and could whip up a class action against some of these greedy OEMs.
I notice three of the circuit boards have Dallas ten year internal battery ram chips so that doesn't bode well. I'll keep you in the loop if I learn anything, and good luck with your projects!
thank you, Leroy. If you are in the UK I can send the contacts of the engineer that I found.
That's very generous of you Andrey, thanks! Unfortunately I'm in the US - Oregon, but we could pay for phone / web support. My email is [email protected], thanks again.
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