Re: [biocurious] Sequencer teardown

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Derek Jacoby <der...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're digging into another next-gen sequencer on Wednesday night!

Only this time, we're not doing it alone. Come and hear Bob Kain, the
Chief Engineer at Illumina, and the leader of the team responsible for
the engineering work on the HiSeq 2000 and subsequent sequencing
devices, walk us through the major components of the system, give an
overview of next generation sequencing, and answer questions about
both the design tradeoffs and the future of the field.

Even having seen what's inside these machines, I'm still excited
enough to hear Bob's take on it that I'm flying back down from
Victoria to take part. Come join us on Wednesday!

Hey, this time, can you guys get a copy of the ROM? I would really like to take a look at it and reverse engineer that. The last teardown you guys skipped this...

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Derek Jacoby]

Bryan, the high level control logic resides on a PC that drives the
sequencer. We are just tearing down the sequencer itself. There is a
custom board that controls the pumps and the heaters, but no obvious
ROM of anything you'd find useful. The motor control is done via an
ASI controller, so that's off the shelf (I believe it's an LX-4000,
but will have to check on that.)

So sorry, but there won't be any ROM to dump this time either. I don't
think that we'd be within our rights to distribute their code anyway,
but as it happens there isn't anything interesting enough there to be
worth asking the question.

Derek

[Bryan Bishop]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Derek Jacoby <der...@gmail.com> wrote:

So sorry, but there won't be any ROM to dump this time either. I don't
think that we'd be within our rights to distribute their code anyway,
but as it happens there isn't anything interesting enough there to be
worth asking the question.

How about dumping the stuff from the computer, then? There's no way there's zero software in this thing. Also, you're probably breaking weird copyright/patent laws by doing the disassembly anyway. Don't quote me on that, but you should double check what you're willing to do if you're going to worry about that in the first place.

[Derek Jacoby]

What we're willing to do, with the generous help and assistance of
Illumina and their Chief Engineer, is take apart a previous generation
sequencer and use it to explain the process of genome sequencing and
get firsthand insight into the design decisions that they made in
scaling up from this model to the current generation of machines.

This machine was delivered as surplus hardware components and that is
all we are tearing down.

I have no idea if there are legalities that we could be running afoul
of, if this were a competitive or adversarial situation with Illumina
we might have to worry about that, but as it happens we are in
communication with them and thus if there is any ambiguity about what
they intended for us to use or release we will simply ask. And it
doesn't currently seem like there is any software worth asking them
about, which I'm sure is not accidental.

Derek