Team:HZAU-China/Hardware
Hardware
1.BioPaFiAR
1.1 The BioPaFiAR hardware device
When bacteria are placed in our AR environment, a device is required to ensure that the light signal from computer is accessible to our cell. So we have designed a device to guide the morphogenesis of colony pattern. In order to prevent our light signal from the outside noise, the bacteria were grown inside of a sealed box without a plate covered. A temperature control module is able to maintain a temperature at 37°C. We also add a UV light inside of the box to prevent contamination. An Ukcsis A6 projector is applied to cast regulatory ray, and a Logitech C270 camera is used to capture images.
An aluminium double-deck bracket divides the box with 5 black Acrylic wall and an Acrylic door into two separate space, the temperature control module are located on the lower deck and the bacteria plate on the upper deck, held by the temperature control module. The camera, projector and UV light are set on the ceiling of the box. For more information please watch our demo video, click here to download. The demonstrating figure is presented below.
1.2 Temperature control unit
In order to maitain a inside temperature of 37, we had constructed a temperature control module to monitor and regulate the temperature inside. This module is made of semiconductor material and controled by STM32 singlechip which was programed by C#(for more details, Figure 2). The program was compiled and burned by keil. Click here to download the source
1.3 BioPaFiAR Program
After comparing the colony images captured by the camera with our setting image, the computer would process a series of computation (more details click here), and emitting light signals through the projector(the projector is connected with our computer, so we can control the light emission from our computer as long as the distance between the camera and the plate fitted the projector working parameters like angles and height ).
The demo of Device-Program combination is available in the device demonstration part within this page. To test our Program, a piece of paper was simulated as an existed colony, and a plate without paper as control group. The result is shown below:
As we can see, there is a very precise recognition around the edges of the paper, which matched our expects. The missing part in the picture lies in the yellow box of Fig.2B, so the program would just ignore it. When the control group is put inside, the program recognizes the new shape immediately and gives out proper light signals.
Next, a test on bacteria colony is carried out. The device starts working as soon as inoculation is completed. The situation after colony formation is shown in Fig.4: the recognition of colony is still good, the light signal roughly hit around the edges of the colony, and the cells would swim in the green light area.
1.4 Demo
we shot a short video of the device demo, which is shown below
1.5 Inside Demo
After the program is initiated, any vibration would result in the drift of bacteria. We have made a VR video to show the inside situation of our device, Figure.5 is one frame of the video. This is a 360° full view video lasting for 1 minute. Click the picture below to download the video. VR player and VR glass like Google Cardboard are recommended while watching this video.
You can click here to download the VR video
2.LPA
2.1 LPA Devices
According to the information supplied by Department of Molecular etc.[1], we constructed an small device, the Light Plate Apparatus (LPA) to control the light for inducing light receptor proteins. It can deliver two dependent 310 to 1550 nm light signals to each well of a 24-well plate with intensity control over three orders of magnitude and millisecond resolution, which can thoroughly satisfy our need.
Whole work done by us is consistent with the description on the paper written by Karl P., etc. To better demonstrate our work, several sentences and pictures will be used from this paper.
Figure 1. Parts and finished product of the LPA device.
Figure 2. Schematic of circuit board microcontroller, programming pins, reset button, and status LEDs.
Figure 3. The LED driver stage can be controlled by microcontroller to regulate the intensity of LEDs.
Figure 4. The final PCB plate printed as described above. And here is our DIY PCB plate.
Figure 5. A. The parameters used to print our auxiliary parts by 3D-printing.
B. 3D-printing product in reality.
Figure 6. Firmware compiling, the environment testing. Steps are as following:
1. Installing the Arduino Libraries.
2. Downloading and Building the Firmware.
3. Troubleshooting compilation.
Figure 7. Different situations when processing firmware compiling.
Figure 8. The file downloaded from http://iris.taborlab.rice.edu.
