Team:IISc-Bangalore/Hardware/GCODe-Mini
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GCODe Mini
What is it?
The GCODe Mini is a neat little device that automates your growth curves. It comes as a sleek black acrylic box that houses a test tube that will hold your culture. Connect the Mini to your laptop via USB, tell it what to do with our associated software, place it in the shaker-incubator, let it warm up for a while, press Start, and sit back and relax while the GCODe mini does your growth curves for you!
What can it do?
The GCODe Mini comes with our custom-written software that can be fully integrated with your phone, laptop, or any device you wish.
The GCODe software can: Send you a notification at specified time intervals or when the OD rises by a specified amount; Alert you when the OD reaches a setpoint; and most importantly, It can run a complete growth curve!
GCODe Mini can take readings nearly every ten seconds, store as .csv, convert that data to a graph and send it to your phone in real time, and even gives you the option to extend the curve via mobile at the press of a button!
If you're wondering how our tiny little machine holds up against a state of the art spectrophotometer, take a look at our results page.
How does it work?
The opaque acrylic casing houses an LED and a photodiode. The LED emits light peaked at a particular wavelength. The light then passes through the contents of the test tube and gets absorbed by the photodiode placed on the other side. This absorption is proportional to the concentration of the sample (Beer-Lambert's law). The photodiode detects the transmitted light intensity and sends a signal to the Arduino, which calculates the optical density (OD) of the sample using the absorbance of the blank culture for calibration.
Praise for the Mini
"We used to spend days standardizing… just to catch that middle lag phase in a diauxic growth curve… if only I had the GCODe Mini back then!" - Sai Matha, Biology Lab Instructor, IISc
"We have the only Bioscreen in the building, so people keep trooping in and out to use it to run growth curves. Sure, we had the money to buy one, but what about other people? - Now there is GCODe!" - Shahnawaz Aziz, PhD student at the Varshney Lab, IISc
"I would love to buy it - just waiting for the version with two test tubes!" - Dr. Neha Bahl, Biology Lab Instructor, IISc
"I'm gonna use the Mini for all my experiments now!" - Rishi, PhD student at the Molecular Pathogenesis Lab, IISc, where we tested the GCODe Mini
