Margot2001.GitHub.io

10 weeks biohackacademy

It has been an interesting 10 weeks at the Biohack academy. We learned how to inoculate microbes, about cells, Dna - Rna - Proteins, the latest gene-editing technology CRISPR, how to build all the machines you could need in a wetlab and a few things more. The idea of this workshop is that you hack something, either one of the machines or a scientific protocol and change it slightly, hack it. Even though I do make things, I was not a hacker. I might be a bit closer now, but the machines available in the fablab were new to me and using electronics is / was a bit of challenge. I struggled for hours with the the 3D printer and decided to let that project wait till after the workshop. And even though one of the reasons to do this workshop, my fascination with revolving patterns in nature, how the micro world resembles the macro world, the real micro world of the microbes was new to me too.
So I havent hacked the incubator. I copied it from the the repository.

Incubator

To be honest, for growing the microbes available at the Waag, you dont really need an incubator, because these organisms will grow quiet easily on room temperature and are not that fragile. You can find all you need to make one here.
The reason that I wanted to make an incubator is to do tests. I have read a few articles that claim that playing mozart to microbes in a sewage system made them grow faster. I would like to test this and the difference between Mozart and House music, and maybe some other music, on the growth of the wonderful slime mold. The thing with experiments is that the circumstances always need to be the same.
The incubator is finally finished now. It looks the same as the one in the repository, with the difference that I made 2 windows for it, one dark and one transparant because some microbes prefer to grow in the dark. And since I want to make timelapses as well you cant just wrap them up.
In the repository there are two recommended temperature sensors, one digital and one analog. If you copy the design in the repository and you buy the digital sensor you will need to change the code for the arduino, which I will post later. Also, you will need a extra 4K7 resistor. For the moment I am concentrating on making "portraits"

Classes

On the pages on the left you can find pictures of some of the classes we have had during the past 10 weeks.