The new semester has started, and things seem to be happening at a furious pace.

As part of professional development days preceding the semester, we invited faculty and staff for a makerspace update, and facilitated a prototyping workshop, solving problems having to do with babies and robots.

Flex Workshop Prototyping

Our staff did some outreach to invite students to participate in our community.

Falcons_Day

Also on the community front, we participated (for the third time) in the third annual Georgetown School Family Tinker Night, an event coordinated by our sister lab at Georgetown School. We brought out a 3D bioprinter and a plotter, and the ever popular Nova (our space bunny mascot) fresnel lens family face distorters.

Nova Faces

Meanwhile, back in the lab…

The jars we inoculated with mushroom spawn earlier in the month are thriving, and we’ll be scaling that project up soon.

Mycelium!

The Science Fish have returned from the library, as we plan and implement whatever v2.0 of our aquaponics efforts will look like. Yes, those are the same three fish – Phoebe, Phinley, and Phreud – still with us after more than two years, and yes, the water cleared up quickly and it’s crystal clear now.

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As part of the CCC Maker grant, we’re able to pay interns to do makerspace-related projects, and some of them are working on a large-scale, interactive periodic table of the elements, to be installed in our large lecture hall. Here Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and Nicole (makerspace facilitator extraordinaire) review some prototypes.

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We’re looking forward to starting the semester with a Grand Opening next week, and to continuing to advance various efforts, including FermSci and biotinkering, some salon-type events in the planning stages, and a million other things I’m probably forgetting. Onward and upward.

MUSHROOMS!

Babies

Inspired by projects like Ecovative’s building and packaging materials – check out this guide to How to Make Your Own Growth Forms – and in line with our other biotinkering and fermentation science efforts, we’ve been slowly gathering mushroom making gear, including an autoclave…

Pressure

and a laminar flow hood.

Hoodie

The liquid mushroom culture syringes arrived, so we inoculated some sterile rye berry jars.

Innoculated

With any luck, the jars will take, and we’ll be able to begin mass production. Meanwhile, we’re figuring out our new Formech vacuum former, and we think there are opportunities to use it in conjunction with our 3D printers and CNC machines to create custom forms for growing mushrooms in the makerspace.

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We recently unboxed our SE3D r3bEL mini bioprinter, which we plan to use for research and development aligned with our fermentation science and other biotinkering efforts.

Bioprinter Arrives!

After some initial setup, I realized that the build plate meant to house petri dishes didn’t fit our petri dishes, so I contacted SE3D and asked for a vector file of the shipped build plates so as to modify one. While waiting for the email back, I went ahead and just measured the existing one, and after a few prototypes, I was able to cut a new one to the right size and shape out of acrylic. In the meantime, Vignesh got back to me – they’re very responsive! – with the DXF file of the build plates that arrived with the machine.

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With the petri dish sorted, I set out to print the stock test file. So far, so good.

3D Printed Bone

A successful test completed, I found a *.stl file of Nova (our Innovation Center mascot and the thing we traditionally create using any new machine), imported it into Slic3r, exported as G-code, and fired up the r3bEL. Other than the fact that the syringe ran out of lotion before the print was finished, it worked a treat!

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I feel fairly confident in saying that this might be the first time in the history of the world that a rabbit wearing a space helmet was 3D printed out of lotion. #fiteme