cellsbutton#04 is over… or at least for me, and for this time. who knows when i gonna be back to wora wari. it was quite sad to leave earlier before the festival really ended, missed the day at the beach, missed the breakcore_labs.
but the next thing is already coming up, one night in singapore and a nice visit to Post-Museum, in little india, where we could a hardware/bio-hacking workshop next time, when passing through singapore. now finally heading to taipei and getting prepared for Playaround 2010 – DIWO culture
Niiiiice, I am back to cellsbutton#04, organized by HONF… the best festival ever!
The first few days were already busy, lots of interesting workshops, parties and discussions. also i met a lot of people, both new but also good old friends. I already got some first soldering action, and tried ways to make a diy version of the diy makeaway bitbadge. sadly i got the wrong site of pcb and cant use the shim for screen printing the solder paste. but with some patience we managed to get a few going…
also had some talks and workshops about new hackteria tools, such as the hacked optical mouse and the hacked PS3 eye mounted on an old microscope stage. i worked with akbar, a young microbiologist from UGM, on it and tested the DIY3 eye microscope for use with a haemocytometer to count yeast cells, which we then presented at the workshop at UGM later.
I was also happy to finally meet Georg Tremel again, from biopresence. He got some great recent work on DIY plant tissue culture and uses it with a blue flower, which is genetically modified for aesthetic reasons. He also did a workshop at UGM and hopefully the “Moondust” will grow there soon… and we got to have him collaborating for hackteria soon!
A first prototype for the diplay at dock18 ist finally finshed. we used an arduino to control 2 daisy chained TLC5940 16 channel PWM LED drivers. From the 5V circuit we control the 220V lamps using a TRIAC. The prototype shown above is a matrix of yellow LEDs which are behind a paper screen.
i am currently working on displaying genetic data using 4 different symbols to represent the nucleotides of the genome. It should kinda play with the idea of digital vs. genetic data. in addition to the the large amount of genetic data in an individual human genome, issues are touched such as genetic privacy, open access and visualisation.
While at the moment the display shows a random DNA sequences generated by the atmega microcontroller, further developments could use the one and only downloadable complete genome sequence of a human individual (of course by craig venter). instead of using advanced visualisation tools such as the HuRef Genome Browser, displaying it on a 5×4 pixel screen turns it into a completely ridiculous lighting scheme. calculating the number of basepairs (3.2 billion bp) in a human genome displayed with a reasonable frame rate would render a single complete sequence to last around 100 years
I have just been doing more experiments using fluorescent dyes. Yesterday at the OpenLab, by SGMK, we messed around with solution of fluorescein. Was great fun. Thinking about ideas to use it for displays. only sometimes it looks almost too cheesy, to much goaparty-style. but with the right context, it might perfectly fit in. Fluorescence is in the end one of the key tools for doing biology and nanosciences.
