Plant electro-mechanics
This project follows on from the previous project "Open Labware for Plant Electrophysiology"
The Idea
We would like to further explore the applicability of the hardware we built for the plant electro-physiology project by further development of monitoring and data gathering capabilities of the shields, Image analysis, signal long time monitoring. As well as to couple the manipulators with a motor system web-application which can be used from desktop or mobile devices and of course fully open source.
We have built a number of 3D manipulators prototypes for positioning of the electrophysiology probes, and control boxes that allow controlling the probes via a cheap Playstation 2 controller. The micromanipulators plans are available on the project’s github repository, which also contains all the schematics and software for building all the tools we developed (https://github.com/calugo/OpenPlant-Electrophysiology). Intructions and more specific details about assembling the kits are or soon will available in the project’s website (http://calugo.github.io/OpenPlant-Electrophysiology/).
The Team
Dr Marco Aita,
Postdoctoral Researcher, The Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge
Ms Marielle Vigouroux,
Computational biologist, John Innes Centre, Norwich
Dr Carlos A. Lugo,
Theoretical physics and software development, EMBL-EBI, Cambridge
Mr Guru Vignesh Radhakrishnan,
Graduate Student, John Innes Centre, Norwich
Project Outputs
Project Report
Summary of the project's achievements and future plans
Project Proposal
Original proposal and application
Report on plant electro-mechanics project - 6 Feb 2017
Summary
We have built a number of 3D manipulators prototypes for the positioning of the electrophysiology probes, and the control boxes that allow controlling them via a cheap Playstation 2 controller. The micromanipulators plans are available on the project’s a github repository, which contains also all the schematics and software for building all the tools we developed (https://github.com/calugo/OpenPlant-Electrophysiology). Instructions and more specific details about assembling the kits are or soon will available in the project’s website (http://calugo.github.io/OpenPlant-Electrophysiology/).
The manipulators will be soon be enhanced to provide 5 degrees of freedom, and camera support in order to precisely and remotely position the electrophysiology probes on plants. A software to collect the readings from the electrophysiology boards and display signals live on screen has been developed. A new version that will allow signal analysis, and data collection/storage is under development.
Two boards that provide Chua's "chaotic" oscillators have been built and have been used to display non-linear effect in synchronized oscillation. These oscillators will be used to inject signals in plants in the next experiments.
We have also developed auxiliary tools (low-frequency signal generator) to test and calibrate the electrophysiology boards.
The tools developed till now have been used in public events with great success. Some of the electrophysiology boards have been built by members of the public, tested, and then distributed in the spirit of fostering and stimulate an open access to science.
It is worth mentioning that this project will be easily integrated in our other project "Desktop plant growth box" thus offering an open source, affordable controlled environment for the study of plant electrophysiology.
Follow-on
In the next immediate period we will build the extended version of the manipulators, which will include 5 degrees of freedom, and camera support. We will implement a DAC in order to inject signals into the plants (the response to which we will monitor with the existing recording boards). We will extend the software to analyse the electrophysiology data, remotely control the positioning of the probes and inject stimuli into the plants.
We will build and make available to hobbyists, schools and researchers more of the electrophysiology boards and manipulators. We will enhance, improve and expand on the documentation already existing.
Finally we will run a set of experiments to show the possibilities of the setup and prepare a publication to disseminate the findin