RoboRoach Project Underway

Read an interview with UM senior Ahmed Suhaib that appeared in today’s issue of the Michigan Daily discussing Backyard Brain’s collaboration with the Biomedical Engineering Design Program to help design our RoboRoach.

Stay tuned, as we work to bring you this and other exciting products in the near future!

Posted: 2010-Feb-15 — Filed under: Education

ByB Says thanks to “Stew” of RadioShack.

Though online retailers such as Mouser, Digikey, and Sparkfun have huge inventories and are cheaper, sometimes it’s just faster to drive over to RadioShack at Briarwood Mall and pick up a component. Plus, there’s the aesthetic appeal of holding parts in your hand, staring at them, and getting a sense of the final design. Many an idea we have had simply looking and daydreaming at the stock shelves.

ByB hereby gives a heartfelt thank you to “Stew” of our local Radio Shack, who has often helped us find just that part we were looking for. There’s still a place for gearheads past all the cell phone accessories…

Posted: 2010-Jan-22 — Filed under: Hardware

DIY Cockroach Water Dispenser

Tired of having to dampen those sponges, and adding fresh potatoes for your cockroaches during these dry winter months?  Well, this may be the solution for you. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Twine (We borrowed some from Colin Stoetzner’s science video art project)
• Shampoo/Mouthwash sampler bottle
• Pair of Scissors
• Cockroaches (Optional)

Simply poke a hole in the top of the bottle, thread the twine through, fill with water, and voilà! You have yourself a self-feeding water bottle! The twine will continually be moist, allowing your little friends to drink during the cover of night.

Special thanks to Karen Coulter for giving ByB this tip from her days studying cockraoches for the RHex Robot Project.

Posted: 2010-Jan-13 — Filed under: Education — Tags: Care and Handeling, Cockroach

The Grant Cycle is Over, and it’s now Dr. Gage

Backyard Brains has been rather quiet over the holiday season, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. Notably, co-founder Gregory Gage successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Biomedical Engineering on December 22nd. Congrats!

Backyard Brains also met David Egner, head of the New Economy Initiative in Michigan, which is a sponsor of Tim’s Kauffman Postdoctoral Fellowship. Tim and David discussed the possibility of a Michigan Postdoctoral Program to fund recent Ph.D.s from Michigan schools to start companies.

Backyard Brains also moved out its old digs in the basement of the TechArb into the new location near the Google Offices on the fourth floor of the building at Liberty and Division…

..while we still make our final choices on chip selection for our first run of SpikerBoxes. Thanks for your patience everyone!

This Saturday (January 9th) also marked the end of the 6 week long grant run. We submitted three SBIR’s: 1 to the NSF, 1 to the NIH, and 1 to the Department of Education. In additional we submitted a few smaller grants: the GLEQ competition, the Advanced E-Team Grant, and finished a feasibility analysis for the the Dare to Dream Assessment competition. The Department of Education SBIR was turned in with five minutes to spare….

Now back to the fun stuff of hardware and experiment design….

Posted: 2010-Jan-11 — Filed under: Biz

A Michigan Life Preserver? Backyard Brains and Ann Arbor featured on PBS

As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” vs. “read states”, and they have identified 12 types of places across the US, including: Evangelical Epicenters, Empty Nests, Boom Towns, etc.

Each of the 12 region types were highlighted by choosing a city and focusing attention on some aspect of life there. Ann Arbor was chosen as the quintessential “Campus and Careers” city, so PBS focused on how Ann Arbor is surviving in a turbulent Michigan economy. Backyard Brains does make a brief cameo in the beginning. Enjoy!

Posted: 2009-Dec-9 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing — Tags: Demo, Media, PBS, Television

ByB Concludes Ivy League Visits, Celebrates Cricket Cigarettes

ByB is back in Ann Arbor after a 1600 mile road trip to Boston and Ithaca to visit Harvard and Cornell. Our guest lecture for Professor Murthy’s neuroscience course went very well; in a first for ByB, the cigarette gatorade cricket ganglion experiment definitively worked! Too bad we weren’t recording the data. Tim put a cricket on wax underneath a microscope, exposed the ganglion, positioned the ganglionizer micromanipulator prototype into position, hooked the bipolar electrodes to the SpikerBox, and heard evoked spikes (from blowing on the Cerci)!!!

Then, Greg took a cigarette (Natural Sherman Unfiltered), put it in a bottle of gatorade, shook it up, and Tim then aliquoted this potent mixture onto the exposed ganglia. And to the delight of everyone in the class, the ganglion neurons increased their firing rate and we even heard some neurons dying (baaaarrrrrraaaaaaaaa…you all know what it sounds like)! Nicotine affects Acetylcholine receptors? Who knew?

Some photos from our trip:

We also visited Michael Fee’s lab at MIT, on the way teaching folks on the subway about neurons:

On the way back to Ann Arbor, Tim stopped by Cornell to visit the pioneers of inexpensive Neurophysiology: The CRAWDAD group. Tim felt at home in the beautiful campus and Mudd Hall, where the magic happens and neurobiology is king.

Tim also met local neuroelectronics guru Bruce Land, who offered some helpful tips on amplifiers. “Remember what you did 10 years ago? We are trying to do the same thing.” He gave us his best wishes.

Posted: 2009-Dec-1 — Filed under: Education

ByB to Guest Lecture at Harvard this Friday 2 PM, Sever Hall, Room 202

If you are in the Boston Area this week, come by Sever Hall, Room 202, at 2 PM this Friday the 20th, for a special lecture by ByB at the Neuroscience Course taught by Professor Venkatesh Murthy. Hecklers welcome, electronics heads even more (survey: what’s your favorite single-ended instrumentation amp?) Hope to see you there!

And yes, we will be driving Bopper.

Posted: 2009-Nov-16 — Filed under: Education

ByB has First Sale, First Field Test!

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of  delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his best one yet!

But, a professor in Minnesota wanted one for a “teaching biology” course she was running this past weekend, so it was delivery by then or wait till next Spring! ByB got it out just in time, and we have our fingers crossed for the feedback!

Now on to getting those PCB’s completed….

Posted: 2009-Nov-9 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing

ByB Founders Published auf Deutsche!

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer recently translated these works in German and published them in a book packed with tongue-in-cheek articles on neuroscience. Contribute to the Backyard Brains R&D fund! You can purchase the book here. A small bit of royalties go to us, and this will pour right into ByB, and ultimately straight back to you, fellow SpikerFriends!

Posted: 2009-Oct-30 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing

ByB brings Spikes to the Society for Neuroscience

Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in 1971 to do actual recordings at the conference! We brought a veritable lab to our exhibit.

And quite the crowd came to see Greg demonstrate our prototypes

And, via our newest collaborator and colleague Alex Wiltschko, we officially announced a new iPhone app for recording spikes! Now you don’t even need a computer to do your neuroscience. See Greg showing it off below..

The official Spanish speaking liaison of Backyard Brains, Mrs. Jennifer Trigger Marzullo, talked about the SpikerBox to some of our fellow Neuroscientists from Mexico and Argentina. “¡Lo hacemos en el garaje!”

Backyard Brains was also proud to announce its first sale! Gina Poe, faculty member at the University of Michigan and a thesis committee member from Tim’s PhD dissertation, gave us a down payment on the first SpikerBox. Thanks Gina! We’re on it!

Of course, with so many of our hero neuroscientists present, Backyard Brains recruited hard. We tried unsuccessfully to convince George Paxinos, author of famed Rat Atlas in Sterotaxic Coordinates, to make a new book on the cockroach. He was kind enough, though, to let us take a picture with him.

And, to Tim’s delight, ByB ran into Eberhard Fetz. One could quite easily argue Tim’s whole PhD Dissertation was based on work done by Professor Fetz. Operant Conditioning of Unit Activity? Done in 1969, better than you. Investigation of LFPs and spikes in Motor Cortex? Done in 1996, better than you. Simultaneous Recording and Stimulation for Closed-Loop Control? Done in 2008, better than you. Even Backyard Brain’s new use of a smartphone as a data acquisition device? Done in 2006, better than you.

But, with a huge smile and a sigh of relief on our parts, Professor Fetz liked the SpikerBox and iPhone app and gave us a thumbs up. Keep us sharp Eb!

Now back to work and getting to production!

Posted: 2009-Oct-22 — Filed under: Education, Marketing