[Bio] Welcome to Biobridge!

[Rikke Rasmussen]

Hey all,

Welcome to the Biobridge mailing list! By way of introduction, here's a
quick update on present status and future plans for the BioBridge group.

Our current project, the BioBoard, one of the entries in the Great Global
Hackerspace Challenge, is coming along really nicely. For any subscribers
unfamiliar with the project, we're basically building a bunch of different
sensors (temp., pH, dissolved oxygen, NIR spectrometer), hooking them up to
a microcontroller and transmitting the sensor data to a server somewhere
with a web app that plots a nice graph for you so you can monitor your
microbial culture in real time from the comfort of your couch.

What we've got so far:

Sensors
- thermometer: 2 different set-ups (one-wire digital thermometer,
thermistor), both functional (yay!) - Charlie's the man here
- pH: several leads, and at least two good brains chippin' away at the
problem  - Rolf and Otute are the dudes on the job
- dO: solvent sandwiched in a cheap and beautiful mylar/vinyl bilayer,
catalyst to arrive on Thursday - Sean's got it down
- NIR: have a fairly decent plan for the LED/photosensor part, but need help
regarding circuitry and wiring - Rikke's fumbling with this one

Microcontroller
- Arduino board + ethernet shield have been successfully delivered to Marc
(I hope?)
- alternative suggestions have come up, we'll go through the pros and cons
of each on Monday

Software
- we've been given an Arduino sketch for above assembly

Project group meetings are on Mondays at 7:30pm at Noisebridge, (new)
deadline is March 3rd. Current plan is another 2 weeks of sensor building,
then a week of assembling and testing and a final week of fine tuning the
final product. All of this ends in a big finale at Maker Faire (where
Biobridge will hopefully also be represented at the Noisebridge table at
least some of the time), May 21st-22nd.

Once Maker Faire is over, it is my hope that we can start hosting regular
classes at Noisebridge - both theoretical (intro to general microbiology,
specific aspects of bacteriology/mycology/phycology as relevant,
biochemistry/molecular biology/genetics, ecology & evolution) and practical
(aerobic/anaerobic fermentation, bacterial/algal cultivation, mushroom
growing, selection/mutagenesis/mating group experiments, basic
transformation, whatever else we think of or find someone to teach) ...in
short, all the fun we can have with microbes. We might well use the
wiki<https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/BioBridge> to
plan this - all input is valued!

 Thoughts, ideas, comments?

/Rikke
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/bio/attachments/20110403/833bad13/attachment.html>