pingpong ball matrix (2x7x8)

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian
@coldclimate and @sc_r making things during howduino

Howduino, what a great event/weekend at the centre for life.
So we had two days of 6 hours each to make stuff around arduino or electronics in general. There were a lot of matrix light projects from @coldclimates and @sc_r s ping pong matrixes, to lee and friends amazing skip finds (two great matrix displays). Another theme was that of remote controll, with @alistair controlling a servo over the internet, and another team a remote controll car from their computer.
There was also the hacking of an animatronic head(yoda like) and the control of housegold power sockets(peter) through a networked arduino. Sophie did a squigglebot, and there was a whiteboard drawer, thom did a dalek that found your face (using the webcam) and pointed his blue led laser gun at you. @oomlout contributed to a lot of the projects, and jim of @sonodrome demoed using a led as an input(light detecting) and output(light  o) device, nice one
These are all the ones I remember, but it would be great to get a complete list.

What did I do?
Investigated using a ldr to get an idea of motor spin speed. In the future this will be great for getting an idea of how fast a centrifuge is spinning, or using it as a counter for bees entering and leaving a beehive.

One of the great things about making the maker faire in Uk each year was catching up with Joris Peels. He speaks his mind, and this is refreshing. Formetrly of Shapeways (and not sure what hes hatching now), we have had a few discussions about what would be usefull for DIYBio.

Basically, how do we DIYBios make this a legitimate pastime, or pursuit, or calling. I welcome some regulation, but can currently see, that by not running a business, regulations do not necessarily apply, as most are dedicated to regulating WORKPLACE not homes.

At the moment I can’t see any regulations that apply, as we are not working with genetically modified organsisms, and keeping to type 1 (harmless) organisms. It does get interesting when people want to do GE in the garage. Next year the Biological agents and Genetically modified Organisms(Contained use) 2011 regulation comes into to force. This may impact on the iGem teams if they are working with organism new to the labs they are working in.

The problem with this hole in regulation I see, is basically, if not regulated to an extent, DIYBio may become illegal due to biosafety concerns.

A brief set of rules that I am working by

1) don’t bring persistant poisons into the house, look for the safest way of doing something, not the fastest. This is not much different to what is done with electronics in the house. If you want to etch using the ferric chloride way, you are left with a persistent poison. There are alternatives (http://hackaday.com/2008/07/28/how-to-etch-a-single-sided-pcb/)

MSDS tells you what poisons are, and their actions. there are many things in the laboratory that are incompatable with home labs. Ethidium Bromide comes to mind, its used to stain DNA, but now there are much safer alternatives. They may seem more expensive, but when you take into account waste disposal, i’d say they are much cheaper.

2) dont work with pathogens, its not worth it.

It does supprise me when people want to culture pathogens without the proper safety equiptment and risk analysis. There are so many other things to explore, like fermentation of beer, making yogurt, sourdough making, cheese making, that are all much more worthy of study and tasty.

3) cleaning hands before and after handling microbes. I have used bathrooms as a easy DIYBio lab for culturing glowing bacteria from seafood (see http://letters.cunningprojects.com/?p=97)

4) minimise waste, think about using slightly more expensive glassware than disposable plasticware

5) have a decontamination strategy, bleach and rinse

6) be very carefull about mixing strong chemicals, many are not compatible. (I would like to get a list of these)

DIY Bio.

This kind of science has at its base many of the concepts of signal processing.
Through mixing a known and unknown signal we can do some mathamatical operations of it.  Basically a transduction of a signal outside of us and our understanding (For an example see optics)
We need to separate the different ideas

1) citizen science = a citizen setting a science question and working out how to answer it
2) crowd sourcing = a scientist setting a question and getting everyone to participate. (big science framework)

What other types of science are there?

Image by loscuadernosdejulia via Flickr

This is my notes and everyones tweets refering to the GloNet Conference Stream at Futureeverything 2010
#futr Glonet

Aims: investigating the process of growing microorgansisms as a domestic performance.

Materials: glowing bacteria, fish, eggs, DNA, mushrooms, gelatin, agar, various fermented “live” drinks, vegetarian and milkbased bioplastics. Outputs: skinning models of domestic artifacts, such as chairs, teapots, straws.

Methodology: trying out things space,using open source recipes by others and i am still ruminating on the “live” ness.

Crossover: wordage on the application meshes with mine, as 25sg talks about being an incubator, and it will literally be that for the period I am there. Leave a comment  if you want to come and talk and learn a bit of biologyness.

I have been thinking about Arduino and Schools for a while. What I like about Arduino is the ease of use, of getting something happening quickly, I particularily like the call and respsone code. . I would like to see the user base explode, and that could happen with some help in schools teaching of Design and Technology. The incumbents in this are parrallex / Pic.

One of a number of people are thinking about how to get arduino into schools.

For this we need to think about a few diferent things.

The price: Arduino is still a little expensive(around £21), it is possible to make a small board with the microcontroller on it for a few pounds (or even paper : see paperduino), the main cost is the ftdi chip/usb interface that allows the arduino to talk to a computer. With the multi leaded surface mount ftdi chip retailing for £3-4(read: more complicated than the atmel chip it talks to), and the cables going for £15 it would not be possible to have a lot of these cables.

I am interested to see what comes out of the discussions of Arduino Puntu Zero, i know it may be some cut down versions.

How to access arduino, a lot of the competitors to arduino have visual programming(for instance Flowal). Here are the three visual programming languages I know of for the arduino.

amici (Windows and OSX) from Eduwear

EduWear aims at contributing to the reduction of inhibiting factors by employing an approach rooted both in education and in ICT development. The objective is to develop an educational low-cost construction kit for wearable and tangible interfaces.”

scratch (osx and windows) + processing/catenary + firmata

Catenary is a small, easy-to-use program that allows a project written in Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) to communicate with an Arduino board (http://www.arduino.cc). Catenary is written in Processing (http://processing.org), and runs as a Java application. It takes advantage of Scratch v1.3’s ability to send and receive broadcasts and global variable messages. Catenary acts as a middleman, shuttling certain messages back and forth between the Arduino board and Scratch.

Modkt.it (windows and osx) downloads

Modkit is an in-browser graphical programming environment for little devices called embedded systems development. Modkit can currently program arduino and arduino compatible hardware using simple graphical blocks similar to and inspired by the scratch programming environment.

Updates: amici now has an osx version.

Interested in any Linux based visual programming tools  for arduino.

wiring a DS18B20 to arduino

Originally uploaded by sctv
For my records, how to wire up the DS18B20 1 wire digital thermomenter (http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm?qv_pk=2812) but using the two wire functionality here.

This is one of the diagrams I use to help me wire up the DS18B30 (bought from nulelectronics.com and using his library) to the arduino.
These little sensors are pretty great, have heated them up to over 130C withouth them failing(though it did stop working). I am using these for getting the temperature of a peltier that I am driving through a hbridge.