Girls in Science and Engineering Summer Camp
Backyard brains was pleased to participate in the Health and Biomedical Sciences Summer Camp put on by UofM’s Women in Science and Engineering organization. The H&BS camp was a week-long set of activities with the goal of giving high school students hands-on experience in different health science related fields, and to broaden their perspectives about what health careers include (beyond/in addition to med school).
We received excellent feedback from the students, and we look forward to teaching more classes in the future. Stay tuned.
Posted: 2009-Jul-29 — Filed under: Education — Tags: K-12, Outreach, WISE
Demo at Ripple
While Tim was on a roadtrip for an interview with the Kauffman foundation, he made a pit stop in Salt Lake City to visit some friends at Ripple. While we at Backyard Brains pride ourselves on our single channel neurophysiology, the engineers at Ripple are designing a >1000 channel neurophysiology system! We picked their brains (using language of course), and you can see Shane Guillory skeptically analyzing the output of our SpikerBox:
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The folks at Ripple are enthusiastic about ByB, and kindly offered up some help on circuit design, publicity, and partnering at conferences. Look for us occasionally hanging out at the Ripple booth at SfN in Chicago. There may be some new implementations of Mind War…. Thanks for lunch guys!
Posted: 2009-Jul-26 — Filed under: Biz, Hardware — Tags: Demo, Ripple
Tim’s Demo for the Kauffman Foundation
Tim spent the tail end of last week in Kansas City, MO. Here is the demo he made while visiting the Kauffman Foundation as a finalist. Tim is applying for the Kauffman Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship program. We here at ByB wish him the best of luck!
Posted: 2009-Jul-23 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing — Tags: Demo, Kauffman
SpikerBox v3 Prototype Complete!
You spoke; we listened. Version 3 of the SpikerBox is complete and fully operational. New features include: built-in Speaker, Gain Control, rapid switching between audio and recording mode, and three standard outputs: BNC, mini-stereo, and RCA. We have a couple more improvements (smaller size, smaller batteries, etc) to make, but stayed tuned. We foresee Version 4 being the market-ready version. Thanks for your patience everyone!
What did the previous versions look like? See SpikerBox1 and SpikerBox2.
Posted: 2009-Jul-15 — Filed under: Hardware, Marketing — Tags: SpikerBox
New Cockroach Species Arrives
We currently have used American Cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) in our experiments, but we have to order them from Carolina Biological Supply in North Carolina, and they are a bit expensive due to live animal shipping charges. No angst towards that fantastic company, but we have been looking for a local supplier that can give us cockroaches at reduced cost. Fear not! Pet Supplies Plus, within walking distance of our labs and workshops can provide us Discoid Cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) at ~$10/dozen! I picked some up last week, they are actually rather cute and look like giant roly-polys. Guess we’ll have some company on our roadtrip to Kansas City to visit the Kauffman Foundation…
Posted: — Filed under: Education — Tags: biology, Cockroach, discoid
Spikes on the OLPC
Backyard Brains is beginning to make in-roads with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative. This week we were able to display spike waveforms from a cockroach leg in real-time on the OLPC laptop. We are using the “Measure” application to display the data. Note the spikes on the XO PC below from our prototype 3 of the Spikerbox.
There are still some features lacking that we will need to get sorted out before we can use the OLPC for experiments. We would like to be able to theshold the spikes in real time, as well as figure out how to retrieve the stored data for analysis.
Posted: 2009-Jul-14 — Filed under: OLPC, Software — Tags: Cockroach, OLPC, Spikes