Alongside the products we ship, we run our own development programs — instrument platforms, data acquisition systems, and ion optics aimed at problems we keep hearing about from the labs we work with. Most of it is internally funded, which means we can share it early. If one of these overlaps your work, we'd rather hear from you now than after it's finished.
Four programs currently underway. Each began with a researcher describing a problem no available product solved.
A vacuum system built from extruded aluminum tube instead of machined stainless. Chamber segments are joined by universal interface plates, and a section is simply a length of tube cut to size — need a longer stage, cut a longer piece. The interface plates carry standard KF fittings, so the chamber drops into an existing vacuum setup without custom flanges.
The extrusion is the key idea. Its inner wall carries machined grooves that accept printed circuit boards directly, so PCB-based ion optics slide into the chamber and locate themselves — no electrode stack to machine, no alignment fixture. Changing the ion optics means ordering a new board, and the chamber it mounts in never changes.
That flexibility covers a full instrument front end: an ESI inlet, on-axis or orthogonal; a dual ion funnel; a PCB quad transfer stage; and on into an analytical quadrupole or a digital quad. Each is a board in a groove, in a chamber a lab can build without a machine shop budget.
An FPGA-based data acquisition system for time-of-flight and ion mobility experiments, using carry-chain delay lines for sub-nanosecond time resolution without the cost of a commercial TDC card. Time-over-threshold measurement recovers pulse height information alongside arrival time, and IMS scan timestamping ties drift-time and flight-time domains together for nested IMS-TOF acquisition.
Firmware, host interface, and board design will be published on the same terms as everything else we build.
A compact, low-cost vacuum gauge that reads pressure and reports it straight to your control software — no separate controller, no rack space. The housing has a KF-16 clamp built in, so it slides directly onto a feedthrough and seals without adapters. It powers from USB, and talks to MIPS over either USB or WiFi.
The WiFi interface is the interesting part: MIPS discovers gauges on the network automatically and connects to as many as you deploy, so instrumenting a multi-stage vacuum system is a matter of adding gauges, not wiring a controller for each one. Optional programmable pressure-limit contact closures and an analog pressure output cover interlocks and legacy equipment.
It's the first of a planned family of USB/WiFi vacuum-control modules. Next in line are valve controllers that close the loop — regulating chamber pressure automatically, including maintaining a controlled differential between two chambers.
PCB-based ion transport structures for elevated-pressure regions where conventional rod sets are impractical or prohibitively expensive. Planar quadrupole geometries and printed ring guides give you multipole ion transport on a board that costs what a PCB costs. Expanded documentation and application notes are in progress.
From a thirty-minute phone call to a multi-year funded partnership.
Our product line exists because researchers asked for things that didn't exist yet. If there's a piece of electronics standing between you and an experiment, describe it to us. Even if we don't build it, the conversation is free — and more than once, a question from one lab has become a product that a dozen others now use.
We keep overhead low deliberately — a small family team, in-house fabrication, and no sales organization — so that research budgets go further. Rates are negotiable for specific circumstances, and remote work by phone, email, or video conference saves considerably over on-site engagement.
Ongoing projects are invoiced monthly against progress. Single-instance technical support is invoiced after delivery. Terms are net 30.
| First 30 minutes | Free |
| Short email or phone reply | Free |
| Hourly Billed in half-hour increments, 1 hour minimum | $140 |
| Daily 8 hours, single calendar day | $1,120 |
| Weekly 5 days, single calendar week | $5,600 |
Rates above assume no travel. Travel, lodging, and materials are billed at cost plus 10%; personal vehicle at the current mileage rate. See the rate sheet for full terms.
Describe the experiment. We'll tell you what it would take — and whether we're the right people to do it. The first conversation costs nothing.