USD 500 microgrants available for workshops, short courses

1. Your name, and that of your organisation (or the organisation that will receive funds on your behalf).

Jeanne Mainetti, Myxonautes

  1. Name of event. Make another post with another event name if you have another event.

Daykomb

3. Email address by which you may be contacted.

contact@myxonautes.org

  1. What open science hardware tool(s) will be the focus of your event?

We will focus on the way to facilitate the documentation during the process of making grow bacterial cellulosis (inovative material) through a captation system of photo, data and text. The idea is to be able to document in real time the growth of the material with data of temperature, humidity and oxygene.
We will focus on the following tools :

  • Rasberry Pi
  • Oxygen and temperature sensors
  • Git and static website
  • Materials for low tech and mobile fermentation chamber
5. Describe your course or workshop, whom and what it is for, where and when it will be held, how many attendees (IRL or virtual) you expect.

The workshop will takes place on April 30 at the BIB Hackerspace in Montpellier with 15 attendees. It will be an experimentation and reflexion about the documentation of the low tech and mobile fermentation chamber of the KOMB project which aims to develop an open hardware device for the culture of an innovative material from the fermentation of the kombucha drink: bacterial cellulose.

6. Do you have plans for ongoing activities after this event OR is it intended that the participants will continue activities after this event? If so, describe the intentions and plans here.

Myxonautes is a non profit organisation who provides biohacking workshops. This will be the second event of the KOMB project.
It will be followed by a 5 days workshop at Nîmes University with a class of 25 students of the design field in october 2023.

  1. What event outputs (e.g. teaching materials, curricula, software, etc.) will you make available? Will these outputs carry an open licence?

Anyone can create, obtain, study, modify, distribute, use, and share designs of the “low tech and mobile fermentation chamber”. Outputs event will carry an open Licence.

General documentation :

The documentation of the device will be presented on the website of the design laboratory PROJEKT (https://projekt.unimes.fr/) and the static website hold by Myxonautes, independent of the academic institution (in development), itself fully copyable and transformable with a fork of the git repository from which it is generated. It will give access to the construction plans of the device (modeled in 3D on the free software BLENDER), to explanatory diagrams of the microbiological ecosystems present (drawn on the free software KRITA) as well as to the monitoring data of the device in operation.

Monitoring :

Currently, this data is collected using oxygen and temperature sensors installed inside or in the immediate environment of the device. These sensors are connected by wire to an ESP32 microcontroller, programmed with ESP HOME, which communicates via the local network (wifi) with a small computer called RASPBERRY PI operating thanks to an operating system derived from DEBIAN called RASPIOS. The RASPBERRY PI uses the MOSQITTO agent to receive MQTT protocol messages from the ESP32. It then stores the data in a CSV file.

For the moment it is possible to read this file by connecting your computer to the local network on which the RASPBERRY PI is also connected.

The workshop will experiment how it would be possible for the future to process the CSV with RRDTOOL in order to obtain graphics in PNG format.

Tables, graphs and real-time data could also be available on a staticwebsite (generated from a git repository) which would reference this information by http links pointing directly to a web server installed on the RAPSPBERRY IP.

The data would thus be interoperable and available in real time for any visitor to the website or the physical premises hosting the device.

  1. What you will use the grant for, roughly.

    100 $ : wifi device
    400 $ : material construction of the low tech and mobile fermentation chamber (stainless steel structure, plastic container, fabric for protective covers)

  2. Provide links (references) to documentation or reviews of similar
    events or works you have executed. School coursework or projects
    can be listed, even social media posts. Anything to give a sense
    of what you’re about and your ability to successfully conduct this
    course or workshop. To keep this short, just the links and their descriptions will do.

10 days workshop on january 2023 : https://workshop-kombucha.myxonautes.org/
group project exemple : Ça sent le design
Myxonautes website : https://myxonautes.org/