Summer 2024 updates!

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:

The Pioreactor 20ml v1.1 is available!

Last May, we released a modest upgrade to our Pioreactor 20ml, called the v1.1. The upgrade is purely optional for users but allows for better heating, mixing, and optics. We love the addition of white labels to the 3D print (accomplished using our new Prusa XL 3D printer).

Improved tubing and luer locks from a new supplier

The silicone tubing we previously used allowed for too much diffusion of air into the system. This had the effect of dosing losing accuracy when the pumps had not run for a long period, and air had displaced liquid. Allowing oxygen to diffuse into the media was another uncontrollable factor in Pioreactor experiments. 

We've partnered with a North American manufacturer to supply improved tubing for our Pioreactors. This tubing is really great: very little air diffusion (in-house tests showed near nil, and the supplier's own tests are excellent), fully autoclavable, similar chemical compatibility with silicone tubing, and much easier to clean.

As a bonus, this manufacturer also makes luer locks, so we've switched our luer locks over to them. This is part of our continuing goal to acquire every component of the Pioreactor from North American suppliers and manufacture the Pioreactor solely in Canada.

Pioreactor diagrams in the UI

We're seeing lots of educators use the Pioreactors in classrooms and labs. Students are paired with a Pioreactor and given lessons about the working principles of bioreactors and cultures. We've also seen advanced teams want to manage individual Pioreactors up-close, right there on the bench, instead of at a control computer.

To solve this, we've added Pioreactor-specific pages in the UI. These pages show controls of only a single Pioreactor (including charts and logs) and a live representation of the single Pioreactor.

Experiment profile improvements

Experiment profiles are our CEO's nerdy side project. He thinks they are the best part of Pioreactor: what's better than meta-automations?! However, they still remain a bit too esoteric for Pioreactor users, so we've added two new features to experiment profiles to help.

The first is a new action type: "when." This action will trigger other actions only when some condition is met. For example, you can start a chemostat when some OD is reached, log a message when a threshold is achieved, or provide safety rails for specific bioprocessing parameters. You can read more about the "when" action here.

Secondly, experiment profiles come with a live editor that gives you feedback when you create or edit an experiment profile. We hope this will help you write more expressive and correct profiles.

Documentation improvements

We're always adding new content to our documentation site, docs.pioreactor.com, but I wanted to highlight a few new pages in particular that you may find useful:

• A new Getting Started index page: a better resource for finding tutorials to get your Pioreactor running. 
• New documentation on networking and working with existing networks. 
• New documentation on powering multiple Pioreactors with single power supply units. 

Conclusion

It's only early in our history, and we're already making exciting changes to our Pioreactor platform. Thanks for being a part of this journey!