I received a BeUno
and the first thing I noticed was that the seal was not good. I know a lot about sealing implant glass tubes - Ive sealed hundreds of glass implants myself and I could immediately tell, even without magnification, that something was wrong.
To test it I pulled a vacuum on the device while suspending it in a liquid containing a UV indicator. This allowed me to check whether any of the liquid entered the glass.
After just one vacuum pull and not even a strong one I saw something shocking:
You can clearly see that the fluorescent liquid entered the implant.
If you at Dsruptive see this and need help with sealing, Id genuinely be happy to assist but delivering implants in this state is unacceptable. Feel free to DM me.
See how the UV marker only infiltrates the top area in a ring, but does not penetrate deeper into the unit? This means the electronics inside would be safe from biomaterial, however the problem here is that this well or cavity could provide an area for bacteria to hide from the body and form a colony. Once a colony is formed, there is the potential for significant toxic protein production and other bacterial waste product to be produced with enough volume that it could cause real health problems. In short, this is a biofouling risk you do not want.
Of course, the glass could also be completely perforated and infiltration could reach internal electronics, but in this case the chip would not function for long.
A small air passage is formed when the glass is overheated or heated for too long. This allows heat to creep down the glass tube and cause it to cool too slowly, allowing the air inside to cool and pull in air from outside through the still very soft glass, forming a dimple in the end and a small air channel or tunnel to the inside. This is common for flame sealing because the flame (if done correctly) is a “browns gas” flame made of pure hydrogen and oxygen. When it burns it is basically invisible, and controlling heat, timing, angle, and exposure is very very difficult. I built a little robot for trying to do it but in the end I was not confident the gas generator I bought from China would not explode on me at some point, so I completely abandoned flame sealing in the lab.
