Jul 07, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We've been working with a cluster of prototype Pioreactors with slight build modifications, but we have settled on an optimized design. As such, we've recently updated our documentation site to include a new hardware setup section in our User Guide. Check it out!
Jun 17, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We’ve been 3D printing many tools to help us assemble all these Pioreactors as we prepare to launch our first batch. Things like cutting circles into thermal material, assembling caps with tubes/grommets, and even aligning the spinning PCB all use 3D printed tools we designed! You can say our Pioreactors are almost artisanal.
Jun 10, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Hi! My name is Kelly, and I’m the new hire here at Pioreactor! I’m a recent graduate from the University of Waterloo with a BSc, and I’ll be working on the experiment repository, while also making some blog posts to document the experience.
Apr 15, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
As we start to take a more critical eye at our project, we are revisiting parts of the Pioreactor that started as temporary hacks, but now need to be updated. Two really positive changes that we've decided on are our cable assemblies. Let me explain.
Apr 04, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We are making steady progress on the Pioreactor. Some small tweaks are left to the electronics, so we expect one, maybe two more PCB development runs. We've been procuring parts for manufacturing from suppliers for an initial run of 250 units for late 2022 (plus extras for spare parts and replacements).
Jan 31, 2022
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Bioreactors have an advantage of being able to closely control an environment for microbes. Often, we wish for a bioreactor to precisely control a single, important variable, and we observe how the microbes respond. We can even push this variable to an extreme value - to an environment that the microbes are not familiar with, with interesting results.
Dec 27, 2021
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We've been working on the version 2 of our HAT for over 6 months now, putting together all the improvements, learnings, and ideas since testing our version 1 board. In this post, we'll go through some of the changes that we are most excited about.
Dec 13, 2021
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
Each Pioreactor has built-in heating and temperature sensors. I emphasize temperature sensors, since I've used enough hot plates to not trust a graduated knob to have any reliability. With a combination of heating and temperature sensors, the Pioreactor is able to keep a set temperature for the culture, regardless of the Pioreactor variations in the construction, ambient temperature, etc.
Nov 12, 2021
Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon
We care a lot about onboarding. I've seen enough Raspberry Pi projects that seem to require deep experience in software compilers and package management (don't worry if you don't know what those are...) before you can get started. This is an immediate barrier to your project! From a "funnel" perspective, you may end up losing up a large fraction of your users just at this stage. Can we do better?
