Web-ready Refrideubator

[Avery louie]

Hey all,

I am working on a web-enabled incubator/refrigerator.  Right now, checking on growing cells is tedious and sometimes you have to travel to the lab at inconvenient times.  Sometimes you show up and nothing has happened, or even worse, the cells are overgrown.

With this system, a picture of the plate (and potentially other data, like absorption spectra of liquid cultures, temperature, etc) is served to you on a webpage, along with a form to set the temperature of the incubator.  This incubator is special because it can heat up or cool down.  Many cells basically stop growing at low temperatures- so all you have to do is set the temperature to 4C and come back to harvest your cells when it is convenient.

So far the software works and the hardware works, and integration is coming soon (tomorrow/this weekend).

If you are interested in this, check out the more detailed posts here.  I will hopefully make detailed documentation someday, but it is time consuming to do and finding time might take a while. If you really, really, want one, let me know*.

--Avery

*the one big technical snafu of this is that you cant host a website from home without port forwarding, which is complicated for folks who dont have admin access to their router.  one solution is to put a server in the middle (say, on heroku), but that is definitely not done yet.  However, the incubator is still accessible via the LAN.

[Marc Juul]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 1:57 AM, Avery louie <inact...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all,

I am working on a web-enabled incubator/refrigerator.  Right now, checking on growing cells is tedious and sometimes you have to travel to the lab at inconvenient times.  Sometimes you show up and nothing has happened, or even worse, the cells are overgrown.

With this system, a picture of the plate (and potentially other data, like absorption spectra of liquid cultures, temperature, etc) is served to you on a webpage, along with a form to set the temperature of the incubator.  This incubator is special because it can heat up or cool down.  Many cells basically stop growing at low temperatures- so all you have to do is set the temperature to 4C and come back to harvest your cells when it is convenient.

So far the software works and the hardware works, and integration is coming soon (tomorrow/this weekend).

If you are interested in this, check out the more detailed posts here.  I will hopefully make detailed documentation someday, but it is time consuming to do and finding time might take a while. If you really, really, want one, let me know*.

Cool! I'm almost done with my re-build of my wifi/web-enabled cheese cave. It's a wine cooler with an ultrosonic humidifer, an OpenWRT router, an arduino and a humidity/temperature sensor. It currently only controls humidity (need to add a relay) but monitors both temperature and humidity. I have mostly complete docs here:

  https://wiki.counterculturelabs.org/index.php/Vegan_cheese/Cheese_cave

I will complete the build in the next week (need to add some code and a water container). Your electronics look nice! Mine are a rats-nest of wires and hot glue :/ (my hackerspace could really use PCB prototyping equipment).

 

--Avery

*the one big technical snafu of this is that you cant host a website from home without port forwarding, which is complicated for folks who dont have admin access to their router.  one solution is to put a server in the middle (say, on heroku), but that is definitely not done yet.  However, the incubator is still accessible via the LAN.

Look at UPnP and NAT-PMP. Many modern routers support either or both of these protocols. I've been working on a general solution for this problem using decentralized web apps that synchronize databases in real time, but it will be a few months still before it's ready to go.