bio.display

The Fab@Home 3D printer I used to create the bacteria prints is now being utilized by hackerspace budapest, a new formation created by IT enthusiasts in Budapest, Hungary. I really hope they will make good use of the hardware & contribute to the effort of developing a cross-platform control software for the Fab@Home printer.

I’ve managed to back-port the cross-platform code I created for controlling the fab@home printer to Windows. So now it runs both on Linux and Windows. Hope the fab@home guys can make use of it somehow 🙂 Included a bunch of unit tests as well. It’s interesting to see a unit test actually moving something physical, though 🙂

The next steps are creating a Qt frontend that will drive the thing. Basically one will be able to draw an image on a bitmap, and then the software will make the fab@home printer drop small droplets of liquid for all pixels that are ‘on’. In the final installation, the droplets will be made of arabinose, and will turn on the fluorescent protein generation genes in the bacteria – making them develop the image through time.

I’ve sort of finished an initial refactoring of the fab@home codebase into different, well-bounded libraries, also porting then meanwhile from Windows-specific source code to cross-platform code dependent only on the standard C++ libraries and boost. The package overview is:

See more on the components page.

Just posted a description and some sample projects for using a cross-platform C++ development environment here. I’ve also created some sample project that can be accessed via subversion from this repository:

http://svn.tyrell.hu/bio.display/samples/

 
It’s been a long fight though, with different toolchain collisions on Windows, but I’ll spare you the details for now…

Having moved back to Budapest, Hungary, now I’m working on the control software for the installation. The plan is to migrate some of the fab@home source code to Qt, and then replace the frontend with one that enables creating a drawing, and which would make the fabber drop liquid on a plate according to the pixels in the drawing.