Bio hacking: a new track; in need of friends

Weeks back, I attended the first meetup of the bio hacking "group", read about building a bio reator

In the title I say "a new track"; meaning a new micro community or 'ability' at the asylum. A new possibility...; we have a few tracks going at the asylum, the 3D printing, the laser cutting, electronics, woodworking and most people dabble in at least 2 of them at a time. But a bio hacking track will be something completely different, it will be the future and that's why I'm so excited.

If you read the article linked above you can see that the bio reactor is the first build and seemingly the most important.
From an advertising point of view it says, that we at the asylum have started this track so come on people and join the future.
From the micro community (track) point of view, it means the Asylum has the ability to grow your s***, so come on and use it to do your experiments.
But the truth, the sad unhappy truth is that, as excited as I am about this, I cannot make this project on my own and currently there seems to be just me and Jesal. Both part timers at the asylum. Both of us are too busy to do this on our own. The build is an extremely simple one.
1. Come up with a basic structure on which tubes can be draped and an algae, water mix can be exposed to sunlight
2. Have a reservoir in place to store the algae, water mix.
3. Create an agitator to keep the mix in the reservoir in motion.
4. CO2 bubbler, CO2 is important to plants as an input material, so air pumping into the reservoir.
5. A timing mechanism to open and shut valves to move the mix in and out of the tubes regularly.

Except for the timing mech, I can do everything else in a week. But when? which week?
And thats why the bio hacking track is in need of friends. A few more people to collect materials, to build intermediate things, like the agitator for example, or the timing mechanism.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

For the last 2 weeks I've been working on the frame of a magic mirror. The uses of a magic mirror as you know from Snow White's step mother are numerous. You can use one to assuage your ego, you can use one to locate a person, you can even look into the future and if Shrek is to be believed you can even find your true love.
I'm sure our magic mirror can do all that and more.
The first thing to do was collecting the materials

1. Wood for the frame
2. Wood to support the innards and to keep them away from the wall.
3. A one way mirror
4. A display
5. A raspberry pi
6. All the cords and connectors
7. An sd card for the pi software
8. A wireless dongle

The display we had lying around... actually we had appropriated the display for the MAME cabinet which was never completed for the most stupid reason, painting!!! grrr.
The other stuff we simply purchased. Easy enough.
R was eager to get the entire thing done in a week, but I wanted to make a frame, a proper solid wooden frame. I have been terrified of making one for the last 7 years and I finally decided to bite the bullet. This time I would use the circular saw for a straight accurate cut and the router for a nice rebate around the edges to fit the mirror and display into. It would be easy.

R went of at the end of day 1 to load the software onto the SD card and get the electronics elements sorted out. While I began building the frame.

The wood I had selected is a piece of 7 foot long 3 inch wide, 4 year old burma teak with a beautiful parallel grain; perfect for using for a frame. I quickly smoothed it with a hand plane, which is by far my favourite hand tool. My most fervent wish is that I hand more hand planes... but space...

Anyway, I got down to rebating. Here is where I made my first mistake. I had decided on using the mitre joint and I thought it would be easier to just rebate the whole length before cutting out the mitred sides. instead of rebating 4 separate pieces. Well turns out that when you cut at 45 degrees, you cannot use the complementary piece as is, since now the rebate is on the long side. duh!
Anyway lesson learnt

Now if any of you think that using power makes work more accurate, perish the thought, it simply doesn't. My 45 degrees was 47 or 44, NEVER 45. I had to go back to the hand plane and plane down to 45 which felt really nice, but sort of beat the whole purpose of using the power tools.

This was the longest, most painful portion of the build. just putting together the frame, and then I discovered that I had made to narrow a rebate. So I then rebated 4 individual pieces, which I was trying to avoid in the first place and ... ok fine... lesson learnt.

R and I then got together and dry ran everything. Here is when we noticed that the adapter for the display to Pi connection stood a good 5 inches proud of the display. That was crazy, a magic mirror that had 6 inches of space behind it is just strange.
To add to our troubles the Pi required on connector, and the display required another, 2 lines running out of the mirror would be strange. One is strange enough, but 2 is too noticeable.
Anyway, that was R's problem. He had to bring that 5 inches down to 2 and 3/4th.
I went on to build up the 3 inch backing onto which to attach the innards of the magic mirror. A simple set of 2 vertical and 2 horizontal members would suffice. With my new friend the router we made 1/2 inch grooves in the members and fit and screwed in the whole thing.
2 more screws attach the backing to the frame.

All that is left now is to 3D print the Pi case, attach a 2 socket power stick to the back and plug in the pi and the display. R has to find a decent DVI to HDMI cable which will fit in the 2 inches of space available behind the mirror.

The build itself has been easy but its been an eye opener.
1. Power tools are not the answer for accuracy. Care is
2. An unplanned build takes longer than a planned one. This can be restated as sometimes it is better to simply purchase the correct sections of wood, instead of going through the scrap and then changing the design accordingly.

Wood working 101: Class number 5

The article I had planned to write on how to setup a semi permanent table saw style guide and stop for a circular saw has taken a sort of a back seat. So has the actual build.

My focus has been distributed as usual between, the magic mirror, the kneeling chair, the basic woodworking classes, a visit to a sawmill and a photo bio reactor. That's a lot... not ofcourse to mention work. I manage to fit that too into my busy schedule.

Today I'll simply talk about my last "basic woodworking" class. As usual before the first session I was nervous as hell. It always happens, even though this was my 5th class. Maybe its the anticipation that I'm misconstruing as nervousness. Whichever it is though, the butterflies roost 3 minutes after the first good morning.

For this class I started something new. Instead of giving them a task upfront, like I did in the previous classes, I simply allowed these guys to play with the wood. They went at it with chisel, saw and plane. My three favourite tools and in my opinion all you need for woodworking.
By 3pm, most except for 2 were tired of the unfocussed play, to them I gave the task of making mallets. I also had a special task in mind, making a sanding block. Without fail, this kept them busy till 7, which far exceeds the 5:30pm limit.

Watching a group of people eagerly discovering wood is always great fun, the joy of being able to stand in the middle of the lab and pick out the one person who is making the saw sing, by sound alone can never be equaled.


The class went through in the usual format
Day 1: Introduction and wood play

Day 2: Session on wood, structure and strength

Day 3: Hand tools: what they do and how to use them 

Day 4: Finishing

This time only 3 finished their laptops, which was odd since they were working non stop. Maybe it was all the jokes and banter. hahaha