Biomaker

Hear from the Biomaker Challenge 2020 finalists and find out more about their low-cost, open-source biological hardware projects.

New monthly virtual meet up for anyone interested in the intersection of biology engineering and computer science.

The Mycotextile project is a transdisciplinary exercise that seeks to develop an open source biomaterial. The project was developed in response to the fast fashion movement, encouraged by the textile industry, which generates serious socioenvironmental consequences. We set out to create a mycelium-based textile from native...

I'm an imaging specialist based in the Department of Zoology with a background in biology and bioinformatics. I have no formal training in any aspect of engineering, but I enjoy working on open hardware projects when the opportunity or need arises. I first heard about XOD at the 2018 Biomaker Fayre last autumn and was excited about its potential to enable people with limited or no coding experience to program microcontrollers. For more experienced users, it offers rapid prototyping of hardware.

A group of young innovators based in Norwich Research Park have made the final of the BBSRC Innovator of the Year 2019 Awards.Their project, initially prototyped through the 2017 Biomaker Challenge, has made speed breeding more accessible to the research community.

The Biomaker Africa programme is the first of its kind in Africa, aimed at training biologists and non-biologists to learn, design, prototype and share science hardware critical to building tools for laboratory use and environmental sensing. Additionally, the programme is geared towards enabling teams to find solutions to problems in agriculture, health, research and education particular to Africa. Biomaker Africa includes 4 countries: Ghana (Kumasi Hive), South Africa (University of Pretoria), Egypt (Mansoura University) and Ethiopia (Bahir Dar University). Harry Akligoh of Kumasi Hive details the exciting two-month intensive Biomaker training program that was implemented this spring.

I’m a hardware designer and embedded systems programmer based outside Boston, MA, and I was an early independent contributor to the XOD project. I come from a background and education more rooted in art and design, sound engineering, and analog circuit design for audio equipment, than software development/code hacking and seem to be more of a “visual thinker,” so the idea of being able to rapidly prototype microprocessor systems with a metaphor like wiring modules together really appealed to me. And I was glad to see that Cambridge chose to use this environment as an educational aid. I think it will be a unique tool for science and engineering students, even with limited programming ability, to build fairly complex microprocessor-based hardware vital to the success of projects in their own fields, and simultaneously teach how to design and think like an engineer.

The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports interdisciplinary activities that address problems of developing countries and aims to develop sustainable and innovative solutions. The SynBio SRI is excited to announce that, together with Dr Lara Allen and Dr Jenny Molloy, we have been successful in a bid to implement the Biomaker programme with key partners in African institutions to build local expertise and capacity through knowledge sharing and exchange of open-source materials.