We just wrapped up our first DropBot workshop where we hosted 13 researchers from Brazil, England, Norway, Estonia, Taiwain, the United States, and Canada. Day 1 began with an introduction to Digital Microfluidics by Aaron Wheeler (slides). Then Ryan Fobel presented an overview of the DropBot system (slides) and led participants through the assembly of a system and installation of the Microdrop software on their computers. We finished the first afternoon with a couple of hours of hands-on time with 5 of the Wheeler lab’s previously built DropBots, a lab tour, and dinner and drinks at a local restaurant/pub.
Day 2 focused on DropBot hardware and software development. Christian Fobel gave an introduction to interfacing with hardware devices using IPython and a newly designed extension module board that makes it easy to prototype new sensors and actuators for the DropBot system. In the afternoon, he demonstrated the integration of these new hardware devices into a Microdrop plugin.
For those people who were unable to make it to the workshop, we’ll post videos and updates to the build instructions in the coming weeks. If you want to hear about upcoming hardware/software releases, join the announcement mailing list and for help building your own DropBot system or if you’re interested in participating in future development, join the dev list.
A big thank you to all of the participants and to members of the Wheeler lab who helped out tremendously. Overall, we think that the workshop was a great success and based on the feedback from participants, we are hoping to see a few more DropBots in the wild in the near future!
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