Episode I - A new hope: no more boring physicists

At the beginning: we were boring physicists

Hi Reader, this blog is meant to be the logbook of a science project.

A Physicist must have a lot of capabilities such as theoretical, experimental and computational; and sometimes this is forgotten (Even sometimes this is encouraged, by arguing that “you can only specialize on one thing”. F**k that s**t!). This time, two senior Physics students (at  University of Antioquia) engaged a research on a polemic field of application: Biological Sciences. You might ask, why polemic?, well, our institute has a long tradition on other fields of research such as quantum mechanics, optics and solid state physics, not related, not even a little, to Biology. That means that is pretty rare that some individuals follow a path different than the mentioned.

This time, we (Gerado and Me, Daniel) will make an experimental approach to the building of a Bioreactor system for the culture of microalgae. Our main goal is design a method to measure the microalgae concentration inside the bioreactor without opening it, which avoids the risk of contamine the microalgae culture. We detected this as an unsolved problem (at least locally) and that was highly motivating for us, so bad that we made a blog about it. We expect to make blog post and videos of our progress (but don’t expect hard details about it).

The interesting part is, that we will be using a Arduino Uno32 chipkit to automate stuff, (measurements basically) and a RaspberryPi to monitor and control all the processes, of course this involves circuit designing and building, also lots of programming, so we will be releasing code and maybe designs (licensed under GPL for hardware and GPL V3 for source code) in order to contribute to the community of free software and hardware.