Monday 15th of September was the date scheduled for the kick-off meeting with the professors who are participating in our project. Because of unexpected reasons we were only able to meet with Prof. Renaud from Microsystems Laboratory 4 at EPFL. Here are the slides (15-09-14_Biodesign) that I used to present the actual state of the project and our future ideas.
As a short summary Professor Renaud advised us to look into the concentration of the GFP light to have a way that is even more efficient. We could try doing some ray tracing. We should also maybe think about designing a prototype that is halfway between our prototype and microfluidics, to try and keep the advantages, and get rid of the the inconveniences of both methods. He advised to look into designing a custom small cylindrical vial in which we could insert our vial and in which we would mix the bacteria and the sample.
For our current prototype (v1.0) he suggested to try and look into filter tricks to have a cheap filter to separate the blue and green lights. We could also try to blink the blue LED and only have the light to frequency converter when the blue LED is off. We could also investigate the use of a larger photodiode, maybe one that has a higher signal to noise ratio. We could also look into using a solar cell to measure the light. We should also take into account the sedimentation of the bacteria during the measurements so that we don’t find ourselves with the bacteria at the bottom of the vial at the end of the measuring time.
The main point during the testing is to look out for the weakest point of our prototype and to improve our prototype from there.
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