HARDWARE

Introduction: Our whole system was triggered by light[1], so E. coli needed to be illuminated when cultured. To make quantitative analysis, we needed to strictly control light intensity and wave length. Our hardware series kept upgrading as our demands increased.

Material: Considering the small volume and high efficiency, we chose 3W LED as our light source after careful calculations[2]. We managed to buy 11 kinds of LEDs with different wave lengths (390-400nm, 420-430nm, 430-440nm, 450-455nm, 460-470nm, 495-500nm, 515-530nm, 590-595nm, 600-605nm, 620-630nm, 655-660nm).

Design: To satisfy multiple needs, we designed two kinds of hardware. One for solid medium, the other for fluid medium.

1. Hardware 1.0 for solid medium

Process: Using thermal conductive adhesive, we fixed the LED beads with substrate to our radiator, which looked like a sunflower. In the following picture, you can see our light source component as a whole, “sunflower”!

Figure 1. Our light source component- “Sunflower”

We managed to dig a hole in a container, which our sunflower perfectly fitted in. We used wires to connect the sunflower with a power source, and the plates inside the container could be illuminated by our lovely light! You would see some of them in the following pictures.

Figure 2. Inside the container.

We made four containers illuminated by LEDs. Then we put four containers into a huge incubator. We called these containers our “Hardware1.0”

Figure 3. Four containers in the incubator.

Generally, this system worked pretty well, and we incubated several colored mediums with sufficient illumination all night.