BioCoder #3

Hacking Lab Equipment

Peter Sand

A typical biology lab is filled with dozens of machines that each function independently. Our goal is to find ways for the machines to interoperate. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create simple electronic interfaces for different kinds of devices so that they can be controlled and coordinated by a computer.

Hacking traditional lab equipment provides a way to incrementally introduce automation into your workflow. You do not need to clear out space for a large, expensive robot that might be more cumbersome than useful. You can gradually add more automation in a way that coexists with manual processes.

Automation has the potential to improve reproducibility by increasing procedural precision and providing new experimental capacity that can be allocated to validating previous results. However, the form of automation is important: an experiment designed around a $200,000 robot may not be easy for an outsider to reproduce. Instead we propose to create experiments designed around the automation of commodity hardware.

For this approach to improve reproducibility, we will need good documentation. We should support equipment manufacturers that provide easy-to-use, easy-to-hack electrical and software interfaces suitable for automation. Open equipment documentation will become an important component of open science.

Our Approach

We will take a do-it-yourself, but not do-everything-yourself approach. If we spend all our time building equipment, we won’t ...