The first SciSpinner prototype

This is the oldest footage we have of a SciSpinner, from April 2017. It was built as an undergraduate project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison through Insight Wisconsin, a student organization for inventors that pairs interdisciplinary teams with real projects, mentors and a small budget. The clinostat was one of those projects, two years before the company existed. Most of its parts were printed on a desktop 3D printer.

Two stepper motors drive the outer frame and inner core on independent axes. A ring of LEDs lights the sample from inside the core. An Arduino, connected to the laptop beside it, runs the motors. The three buttons on the box change the colour of the LEDs, and that is the entire user interface.

The SciSpinner Max still uses the same basic arrangement: two independently driven axes with the sample at the centre. What has been added since is what makes a run measurable and repeatable: geared motors with settable speeds, a sealed chamber, a camera and environmental sensors in the core, and a motion sensor module that records the time-averaged gravity at the sample position.