'Enter the amateur!' - DIYbio @ Madlab

Photo: madlabuk

On Wednesday night I managed to get down to the first Manchester DIYbio event at Madlab. It was the kind of event I wouldn't usually have been instinctively drawn to, but after Lia at Madlab suggested I check it out and get my thoughts down I decided to get in there and see what the project was about. I was initially there on a whim and wasn't expecting to be hugely involved, but I came out of it with every intention of getting stuck into the project first-hand.

DIYBio "is an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety". The movement covers a wealth of community-driven projects all over the world, spanning a wide range of disciplines, with a focus on bringing biology out of the lab and into the hands of people who wouldn't ordinarily have access to these fields.

Going into the event I was a little apprehensive that I'd be in a minority of techies in a large group of terribly knowledgeable biologist types. It was quite nice to find out that actually the group was comprised of more tech folks than scientists, and after chatting to a few people it quickly became clear there is a great range of practitioners involved, both from Team Digital and Team Science. :)

The overall plan is that any future project ideas will be open to the group for discussion and planning, but as a introductory project the organisers have come up with The Manchester Microbe Map: an investigation into the microbes on ATM machines all over the city. I think this is a great starting point: it's an interesting idea that will allow the group to establish who can do what, both in terms of who's willing get out there and get stuff done, and also who can bring particular skills to the table. My interest with this project is definitely the data visualisation end of things: once we have our data, what can we do with it digitally? I love the idea of getting this stuff mapped out and visualising things like physical factors, proximity to certain places of interest, time of day etc: there's a lot of factors we might consider, and it might even turn out we discover more factors once we get stuck into the data. The final piece is being shown (I think) at FutureEverything, so it would be great to be involved from the outset. Hopefully there'll be some data vis ninjas involved that I can learn from.

As part of the Microbe Map project involves swabbing for samples, we also ran through a highly entertaining demo on DNA extraction "tiki-style", using pineapple juice, washing up liquid, salt, and a sample of saliva. Bonus points to those who drank the shot afterwards ("in the name of science!"), I wasn't remotely man enough to try it.

DIYBio MCR looks like it could turn out to be hugely interesting anyway, there's a ton of talented people involved, and a massive scope to do, well, anything. Once again, the Madlab guys have allowed this to happen in a really great environment, and I couldn't be happier that Manchester is involved in another awesome project like this. The DIYBio meetups are once a month, hopefully this initial project will kickstart something brilliant. Looking forward to the next one!

Beginner's Arduino @ Madlab

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend an introductory Arduino course at Madlab in Manchester. I've been wanting to get into this stuff for a while now, so when the course came up I jumped at the chance to get stuck in.

Madlab itself is an awesome space, somehow I managed to completely pass it by and not attend anything there until yesterday. What they're doing is a really good thing: creating a proper grass-roots creative space for the whole city to use. Next time they need volunteers for things (I've seen them put a few calls out in the past), I'll definitely be getting stuck into helping them out, it's a great place run by great folks. The Omniversity programme reflects this too, offering a really diverse range of training at an amazing price: the Arduino course was £120 for a whole day's training, and I came out with an Uno board and a loads of bits. Bargain.

Anyway, Arduino is an open-source hardware platform that lends itself really well to experimentation and prototyping. It's cheap, really easy to get into, and allows programmers to screw around with electronics pretty quickly without requiring a shitload of prior knowledge. It seems like a logical progression for me: I know Flash inside out, and I do a little Processing, I love to experiment, and I'm too old for Lego. The Arduino platform fits my requirements pretty much perfectly then.

Within a few minutes we'd connected the boards via USB and got them up and running. The Arduino language is very similar to Processing, in fact the environment is almost identical. The main difference to Processing is the fact that once you've finished writing your code in Arduino, you can hit 'upload' and send everything to the physical board. The whole process was far easier than I was expecting, and the satisfaction of seeing your code controlling physical components for the first time is absolutely immense. Even just wiring up a couple of LED's and a potentiometer and making it work properly gave me a real sense of 'I made this! With my hands!'. We kept connected via USB for these lessons, but once the code is uploaded to the chip's memory you can hook up a 9v battery or even an AC adaptor. Very flexible.

The physical components themselves are wired to a breadboard, which is none-permanent (i.e. not soldered in). This means you can screw around with things all day and re-use everything. Of course, if you wanted to make something permanent you could easily transfer your hardware to a smaller Arduino and solder it all in, no problem. At the moment my interest is in experimentation, so the Uno fits the bill great.

Once we'd gotten the basics down, everything else followed really quickly. The group was quite small, and we were all kind of the same level, so things moved pretty swiftly. The course materials were great too, we got printed versions of all the board layouts, along with all the stuff digitally too. The projects themselves were great, each one introduced a new idea or concept or component, but in a way that really wanted you to keep messing around and pushing it further. The highlight for me was getting wiring up a potentiometer and a light sensor to act as a makeshift theremin, incredibly geeky but very cool.

So, next steps? I ordered a basic starter kit from Oomlout that has more stuff to play around with, and my priority objective is to get my hardware talking to Flash, probably using something like AS3glue. Once that's down, the possibilities are absolutely endless: I love the idea of controlling my Flash games with accelerometers and light sensors and generally going nuts with the tech.

Overall it was a great day. If you're even remotely interested in this stuff, you have got to check Arduino out. I feel like this is definitely just the beginning of some serious nerd-fu.