Micro challenges are aimed to be an intense week project where we incorporate all the knowledge acquired during the previous weeks. In this case, we used laser-cutting, engraving and learning how to use GitHub to create a repository as well as understanding how to export files for web in order to better optimise resources.
Photobioreactor
In this challenge, we teamed up with Pippa, Paula B., Marina and myself. We are all interested in finding new ways of bioremediation of the problems caused in the Anthropocene era. Since we all were interested in fabricating a photobioreactor for different purposes, we decided that the best approach would be to do it together instead of fabricating 4 photobioreactors.
What is a photobioreactor? Is a cultivation system designed for growing photoautotrophic organisms using artificial light sources or solar light to facilitate photosynthesis. PBRs are typically used to cultivate microalgae, cyanobacteria, macroalgae, and some mosses.
I’m interested in growing spirulina, a microalga with so many nutritional benefits as well as being an organism that has a high capability of C02 fixation. Since my final project is going to be a series of wearables attached to my body where I will host the spirulina and keep it alive thanks to my body heat and the movements of my body for the aerification, like this I will be bioremediating air on the move that is to say negating my C02 footprint.
My other teammates have different approaches and we would like to cultivate other types of algae like chlorella or purple bacteria. For this project, we decided to focus on cultivating Spirulina since is the easiest want to find alive. We were planning ahead of what we will need for this challenge and we could order the different components before the challenge started. First, we tried to agree on a common idea for the design of the PBR and then we divided ourselves into different tasks.
I was in charge of the electronics part. First of all, I asked Chris if I could borrow part of his code that he already wrote to cultivate spirulina at his home. This code was connecting an air pump controlled by a relay and LEDs. Since we only needed the air pump to keep alive the spirulina, I didn’t use the rest of the code. But it was a great help to understand how it works and from that keep on writing the different functions to control the LEDs and a peristaltic pump. I learned a lot about wiring and the difference between voltages and the number of ampers required for each component. In this case, I found it more challenging to connect all the components properly than to write the actual code. As most of you know Thursday of that week my laptop was stolen and I lost all the code that we were working on, it was really disappointing but I think that it won't be so hard to do it again since I understood quite well the flow chart.
I personally think that we did a good job and I agree that it's important to divide and conquer but I think that while we were doing our own different tasks we didn’t have any ideas of what was going on with the rest of the team. And I found that the product design was too complex for what we aimed to use in different workshops and transport. I think that maybe this problem occurred since we were too many team members and the communication between us wasn’t the best. Also, I think we all learned that is important to stay true to ourselves and be more confident and follow our initial idea.
