Getting a home-made open-source ultrasound machine (dev-kit) up and running in your garage / hackerspace / fablab for less than 500$ (want the bolts and nuts of the murgen-based prototype ? Read a more complete ReadMeMore.md and in general the murgen repo ).
For a full overview of the adventure, visit our Hackaday page =)
We've got our first ultrasound image with the murgen board =) Not a baby, mind you, but at least an echo coming from a part of a fantom (condom filled with agar gel and tapioca balls) in front of the transducer. And we haven't tapped into the full capabilities of the board yet, so it can be improved! Enclosed, the picture of the same fantom, using a commercial, 100k$ ultrasound machine.
Disclaimer #1: though an engineer, this project is the first of its sort, we never did something related. Bear with us, and the discovery process – we’re happy to learn on the way =)
Disclaimer #2: ultrasound raises questions. In case you build a scanner, use caution and good sense!
Time to get some shopping done !
- Get a murgen dev-kit: 140€ in electronics + PCB. Or 100€ with the components to put on a breadboard =)
- Get a BitScope: 150€
- Get a transducer : 110€ for brand new adaptaed ones, ~100€ for one found on ebay and hacking it
- Get a Trinket Pro / Arduino : 10€
- Get some small electronics (breadboard, cables et al) : 20€
- Misc (Pizza, Beer, and a donation to Murgen): 15€
Total spent: 400€ to 450€
- Connect the BitScope Chan A to Trinket Pin 11, and Chan B to Tests Points2 and 3.
- Connect the trinket pins 12 and 13 to a 5-to-3V convertor (or double invertor), then to the board USPP and USPN pins.
- Bring power to the board (GND, 5V, 3.3V) - the board uses ~150mA at 5V, so you can use a breadboard alim (see IMG_2413 below).
Just Install the following:
- BitScope BitLib
- python math tools
- something to code arduino
- Clone the murgen repo TOADD:LIEN
You're good to go !
- A more complete ReadMe : Information, and more, with a focus on the electronic part of the project
- Session 1 : Powering the board, power use, first (bad) trigging and echoes (06 March 2016)
- Session 2 : Non-controlled pulsing, inverters, better echoes (11 March 2016)
- Session 3 : Getting controlled pulsing, but width not controlled (15 March 2016)
- Session 4 : Width of the pulses is getting controlled =) (19 March 2016)
- Session 4b : Simple data visualisation with BitScope (19 March 2016)
- Session 5 : moving the transducer to get the first image (20 March 2016)
- Session 6 : Getting a clinically usable image (28 March 2016)
Playing with a broken transducer in a haribo sweet box to see if you can hack ultrasounds.
Up to v1.0, we're still playing with the board, so there's not interface with the BBB.
However, there's a series of tools to play with the board, one of which being the bitscope, a bit more handy than the redpitaya that the main echopen project uses, and though it is less precise, we do have less issues (trigging, memory, ...) with it.
The murgen investigation had started in September 2015, but following a meetup at echopen’s HQ in Paris end of November, it had been activated again. The objective was to get a first functional prototype by February 2015, but this deadline was then fixed to March 24th, 2016, on which date murgen will be presented.
*Thanks to Jerome, Farad, Vincent obviously *Thanks to Murgen, Sofian, Amit, Emmanuel, Florent, Bertrand & PHH, Mike in a way, list goes on ! *Thanks to echOpen for the environment, wifi and coffee =)
- Read the the Hackday Blog of the fork !
- Explore echOpen’s general wiki
- Suscribe to the mailing list at all@murgen.echopen.org
- Or wander around the rest of echOpen's GitHub repos
- Meet us on the social networks ? ** Join our Facebook group. ** Twitter: follow echOpenorg.
- Meet us physically on friday at our apéros =)
The Murgen project and its prototypes are open hardware, and working with open-hardware components.
Licensed under TAPR Open Hardware License (www.tapr.org/OHL)
Copyright Murgen and Kelu124 (murgen@echopen.org , luc@echopen.org / kelu124@gmail.com ) 2015-2016