Hackaday Podcast 060: Counting Bees, DogBox Transmissions, and the Lowdown on Vents, BiPAP, and PCR

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the past week in hardware hacking. There’s a new king of supercomputing and it’s everyone! Have you ever tried to count bees? Precision is just a cleverly threaded bolt away. And we dig into some of the technical details of the coronavirus …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Podcast 060: Counting Bees, DogBox Transmissions, and the Lowdown on Vents, BiPAP, and PCR

DNA Now Stands for Data and Knowledge Accumulation

Technology frequently looks at nature to make improvements in efficiency, and we may be nearing a new breakthrough in copying how nature stores data. Maybe some day your thumb drive will be your actual thumb. The entire works of Shakespeare could be stored in an infinite number of monkeys. DNA …read more

Continue reading DNA Now Stands for Data and Knowledge Accumulation

Put the Power of PCR in Your Pocket with this Open-Source Thermal Cycler

When the first thermal cyclers for the polymerase chain reaction came out in the 1980s, they were as expensive as a market driven by grant money could make them. Things haven’t got much better over the years, largely shutting STEM classes and biohackers out of the PCR market. That may …read more

Continue reading Put the Power of PCR in Your Pocket with this Open-Source Thermal Cycler

OSM (Pronounced Awesome) Hardware Makes DNA in Space

OSM stands for Oligonucleotide Synthesizer designed for use in Microgravity, meaning that it’s a device that makes arbitrary DNA strands (of moderate length) in space. Cool eh? I’ve been working on this project for the last eight months with a wonderful team of fellow hackers as part of the Stanford Student Space Initiative, and I’d like to share what we’re doing, what we’ve already done, and where we’re going.

Why space? Well, first of all, space is cool. But more seriously, access to arbitrary DNA in space could accelerate research in a plethora of fields, and the ability …read more

Continue reading OSM (Pronounced Awesome) Hardware Makes DNA in Space