2024 in review
Hello! It's been an exciting year at Pioreactor. We've grown the team, launched new products, and added lots of new features. Let's explore some of our 2024 highlights!
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:
Announcing the Pioreactor 20ml v1.1
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!
Multi-experiments are now available in your cluster!
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.
Experiment profiles are your secret to bioreactor automation
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"!
Expanding Pioreactor's Open-Source Ecosystem
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.
Raspberry Pi's New OS Bookworm: Advancements for Pioreactor
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.
We’re Stacking Hats
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.
Upgrade your Pioreactor with a high-temp plastic
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.
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