Moving in...

Visits to the Fields

See specific post for various visits to the fields and forests around Yogyakarta.

With Akbar, we also went to Gemolong in Surakarta, to see his recent project, a newly developed facility to make biodecomposer

Fermentation Philosophies

Talks & Presentations

see specific post

"On BioHacking and Education in the Life Sciences"
Wed 11 Jan, 13pm | Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Fakultas Bioteknologi

Discussion : Understanding Art, Science and Technology
Wed 18 Jan, 18pm, Umahseni, Jakarta
With Dr. Marc Dusseiller, Dr. Denisa Kera, HONF

MobileKitchenLab Workshop

see hackteria posts for more details...

Projects in the HONFablab

Writing some Texts
Starting soon...

Chill-out with Friends

Lecture series: Hackteria, BioHacking and FoodHacking
Fri 27 Jan, 14h, UKDW, Yogyakarta
With Dr. Marc Dusseiller, Dr. Denisa Kera, Tommy / HONF

Thu 26 Jan 10h, Universitas Sanata Dharma Yogyakarta, Kampus Iii
With Dr. Marc Dusseiller, Dr. Denisa Kera, Ira / HONF

Prelude to the "Mobile KitchenLab Workshop - Hacking Angkringan"

Discussion : Understanding Art, Science and Technology
Wed 18 Jan, 18pm, Umahseni, Jakarta
With Venzha (HONF), Dr. Marc Dusseiller, Dr. Denisa Kera and Pak Enin

"On BioHacking and Education in the Life Sciences"
Wed 11 Jan, 13pm | Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Fakultas Bioteknologi

Download the .pdf slides here: dusjagr_UGM_bioteknologi_lowres

During the two hours I wanted to show some examples, on how such interdisciplinary activies in the sphere of biohackers, artists and geeks has a great and inspiring influence on developing new ways to teach and communicate science. During the 5 years of working in the framework of SGMK and the hackteria project, also in different cultural background from Europe through India, Taiwan and Indonesia, i could learn from all the collaborations. Being always open to learn new things is key of being a good teacher! Examples have been shown on how the HackteriaLab2011 has influenced the workshop for children at Ars Electronica "BioCyberKidzz" and generally the DIY and hacker's approach on my teaching to the students in life science technology at FHNW, in the "wetPONG" lab courses.

Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher

Naiiice... 6 weeks in Yogya!

First impressions on dusjagr's fbook

And a nice nuYear party...

With the new implementation we can now use the whole spectrum of live image processing and analysis, like openCV for motion tracking, or additional sound synthesis. hope to jam the worms soon...

download the new files here:
worm_on_mouse2pdGEM_v1

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!

First experiments are underway of using simple geometrical micro-chambers in PDMS to be able to sort and seperate motile whole organisms. At the moment the students of life science technologies, FHNW, are investigating the device shown above, which exhibits 3 different triangular filters with varying gate dimensions, using Anguilla Aceti (Nematode).

a movie will be uploaded soon...

The frame rate of the transmitted image is sadly relatively low, cos the ADNS chip is not meant to present this info at higher speed. still its reasonable, when reading all 18x18 pixel a framerate of roughly 5 fps is feasible, if you only dump the first couple of lines you can increase it to higher framerates.

After building a patch to visualize all these data from pd, i started experimenting with placing microorganisms on top of the sensor, keeping the optics intact, but replacing the LED with an RBG, so i can control illumination.

I got some really amazing results, it seems i can detect single cell microorganisms using just the mouse sensor and an arduino. see the movie below. while the sensor only detects motion if the whole image is shifted, it seems that when a microorganism (Blepharisma Japonicum) passes the field of view, there is a substantial change in the SQL-value.

further i will try to do some simple image processing on the arduino directly, such as simple background substraction.

Download Code
The code for the arduino and puredata can be found here (work in progress):

worm_on_mouse2pd

* The arduino code, uses two libraries: pitches.h and SimpleMessageSystem.h. the first is just used to play a nice little welcome melody, the second is only needed to communicate back from pd to change the dumpWidth of the frame. copy them to your libraries folder.

* The pd patch uses two externals, "convert" to communicate with SimpleMessageSystem" (again only from pd to arduino not vice-versa) and a second one, "pd_fire_grad" to apply a look-up-table (LUT) to the pixels for better visualization.

so we tried to cut tape glued on top of microscopy slides, to be used as master for casting PDMS microchannels, see my article on homemade microfluidics, to be published in chips&tips. with these structures i will be able to do nice practical lab experiments on microfluidics with the students from FHNW.

more than that, of course we had the laser power all the way up, cos its fun, creates a lot of smoke and is spectacular to watch. and it seems the laser cut right into the glass slides.... hmmm that looked like fun. so we spent the rest of the evening carving our custom made microsocpy slides, see pictures below.

of course we didnt stop there and tested the laser micro-projector, see older post, and could beautifully project through the glass slides and get a nice, sharp and clear image of the dusjagr icon projected on our neighbors wall. hmmm that also looks quite interesting.