Jul 25, 2024
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We're in the hot months of summer here in Waterloo, Canada! Our manufacturing and R&D office are filled with 3D printers (up to six printers now), boxes of pumps and circuit boards, and orders ready to go out. But let's talk about some of the recent improvements we've made to the Pioreactor:
May 01, 2024
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Available today is the our latest (minor) iteration on the Pioreactor 20ml! We're calling it the Pioreactor 20ml v1.1. This latest version is the culmination of lots of design tweaks over the past year. It's purely a mechanical upgrade - no electronic changes are made - but improves upon the already simple design of the Pioreactor v1.0. You can purchase the improved Pioreactor 20ml v1.1 now from our shop. And the best part: we're selling v1.0 → v1.1 upgrade kits, too!
Apr 05, 2024
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Users with multiple Pioreactors have been asking for the ability to host multiple experiments and assign Pioreactors to them in your cluster. And now, with software version 24.4.3, you can! This means you can more easily share your Pioreactor cluster with colleagues, or manage student experiments in one view.
Jan 30, 2024
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Last summer, we released experiment profiles as a way to headless-ly control your Pioreactor from a file. We described them as "scripts (like a movie script) that you can write to automate activities in your Pioreactor cluster." Initially, the actions you could run were simple: start, stop, pause, resume, & update jobs. You couldn't pull in live data into profiles to make dynamic decisions, or repeat actions.
With the software release 24.1.25, and the next upcoming release, experiment profiles changes from just a "movie script" to a "live-action, audience participating, theatrical performance"!
Jan 09, 2024
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Our Pioreactor 20ml is built on so many open source projects and ideas - we can't help but return the favour. That's why, for the past 3 years, our software has been 100% open source. We've promised to open sourcing more as we grow, and today is another milestone day on that journey.
Oct 23, 2023
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Every two years, Raspberry Pi (the company) releases a new operating system that comes with some great improvements. Last week, they released their latest iteration, called Bookworm. The Pioreactor software is a derivative of their operating systems, and were really excited about this release. It offers some significant improvements for our software which I discuss below.
Sep 12, 2023
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
When we need to add new hardware to the Pioreactor, we've chosen the very simple and very funny solution: stacking HATs. That's right, we're stacking HATs right on top of each other. The stacked HAT mechanic provides a really user-friendly and modular way to extend a Pioreactor. We can design and build new HAT hardware to extend functionalities. Users can mix-and-match which HATs they want to use, and the community can design HATs, too.
Aug 31, 2023
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
So starting today, we're offering two upgrades:
1. When you purchase a Pioreactor, you can upgrade to PC-CF and never have to worry about how hot your plastic will get.
2. An upgrade kit to replace your existing PLA Pioreactor with PC-CF.
Aug 14, 2023
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We mentioned in a previous blog post that we are now 3D printing our vial caps, and how this opened up a much larger design space for us. Well, introducing the first stop in this design space: our new Vial Cap A!
