bio.display

After spending some time in Venice last week, preparing for the Corpora exhibition, I’m ready to pick up the threads again for the bio.display project.

The overall plan for the remaining 3 weeks here are:

• verify bacteria sterilization via UV lamps
• get and build the precision valve that is capable of the arabinose drops 5μl or less
• start to reprogram the fab@home 3D fabber (get a JTAG adapter for it, etc.)

During my time not here, Bastiaan Ekeler at the Waag FabLab managed to finish the fab@home 3D fabber – mostly. That is, the soldering that I did has to be re-done, so I have to get some replacement parts for those connectors.

Vincent van Rixel and Joeri Verasdonck here at the Leiden University also made some experiments with the bacteria, for example to try to create smaller pixels within the bacteria by using smaller drops (less than 5 μl) on an agar surface full of bacteria. Unfortunately the experiments didn’t really seem to have worked out.

I’ll re-grow the bacteria tomorrow on some plates, so that we have individual colonies as needed. And I’ll also look for a suitable UV light that can be used for sterilization meanwhile.

Alex Schaub will contact the valve company, so that we can find out what is needed overall for the precision valve. Then we can get along with that.

I also ordered a JTAG adapter for the fab@home fabber’s control circuit, so that I can re-program it. Unfortunately I didn’t get it yet, there’s some issues with the ordering. It would be so much nicer if they shipped the JTAG adapter with the kit itself.

So there’s quite a handful to do in these 3 weeks, and in two cities: Leiden and Amsterdam, which makes it even more complicated…