Raspberry Pi Pico Powers a DIY Blood Lab Centrifuge

Fifty Dollars of Parts Versus a Lab Budget Line

A centrifuge is not a glamorous instrument. It spins tubes. But a benchtop unit rated for cell separation is a four-figure purchase, and that number is a real barrier for a small lab or an independent researcher. Thomas Nguyen has been building one instead, driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico, and Hackaday covered the project on September 17.

• Controller: Raspberry Pi Pico, with an MPU-6050 accelerometer for imbalance detection and an IR reflective sensor for closed-loop RPM
• Drive: an A2212 1000 KV brushless drone motor on a 30A ESC with braking disabled
• Target: 400 g for 30 minutes, which works out to roughly 1,545 RPM at a rotor radius near 150mm
• Cost: about $50 in additional parts on top of components the builder already had

What the Microcontroller Is Actually Doing

The motor is the cheap part. The Pico is there because an unbalanced rotor spinning at 1,500 RPM with liquid in it is a genuinely dangerous object, and the difference between a shop tool and an instrument is the control loop wrapped around it.

Two sensors do that work. The MPU-6050 watches for vibration signatures that indicate an imbalance and cuts the motor when it sees one, which is the same job the lid interlock and imbalance detector do on a commercial unit. The IR reflective sensor gives closed-loop speed feedback, so the machine holds a setpoint rather than an open-loop throttle position — important when the spec you care about is relative centrifugal force sustained over half an hour, not raw RPM.

The mechanical side is a steel rod on a rigid coupler with 3D-printed PETG for the base, rotor and bearing holder, carrying a four-arm rotor for 15mL conical tubes. PETG over PLA is the right call for anything that gets warm and carries load.

Why 400 g for 30 Minutes?

That figure is not arbitrary. It is the standard protocol for isolating peripheral blood mononuclear cells over a density gradient — the step that pulls T cells out of a blood sample. PBMC isolation sits at the front of an enormous amount of immunology and cancer immunotherapy work, and it is exactly the kind of routine, high-volume bench step where equipment cost decides who gets to do the research at all.

Nguyen's stated goal is to make cancer research infrastructure open-sourced and cheap, and the project follows through: CAD is published on Onshape and the control code is headed for GitHub.

How Far Along Is It?

Honestly assessed, this is a working prototype rather than a finished instrument. The machine is mechanically assembled and motor-tested, and the builder has laid out the validation gates it has to clear before anything biological goes near it: a balance test, a verified imbalance shutdown, and a separation run using dyed water layered over glycerol to confirm the gradient behaves. Only then does real sample work start.

That sequencing is the most encouraging part of the project. Plenty of maker hardware skips straight to the demo. Publishing the test plan before the results is how you tell someone is building an instrument rather than a video.

It belongs to a growing category of open lab and motion hardware on cheap microcontrollers, alongside things like the open-source ARDEP motor control board and the BPI-VP10 RISC-V servo board. More projects in our mini computer coverage.

Sources: Hackaday — September 17, 2026; Comfyspace project log — accessed September 18, 2026.