CARE-PCR: A Portable OpenPCR Thermocyler

Environmental monitoring applications often employ an RT-PCR assay step in their methodologies, and often collect samples in the field, far away from a laboratory. In this setting, such fieldwork would benefit greatly from a device that can carry out the reaction. This project involved the construction of a custom RT-PCR thermocycler based on OpenPCR's open source design with the objective of portability, achieved through battery operation. Design changes were made to both scale back the power consumption of the device to 50W, while managing the tradeoffs that come with this miniaturization in order to achieve battery powered operation. A heating element was introduced to improve temperature ramp rate performance, alongside a custom power module to facilitate battery operations. Portability is supplemented by LCD-keypad standalone user interfacing, alongside logging and real time clock features for user accessibility.