You have waited, and waited, and waited, and finally it has arrived, thanks to the help of Daniel Silva, Biochemist at the Universidad Católica, our http://www.backyardbrains.cl Website is 95% translated in spanish! Now students across Latin America can join the NeuroRevolution. We only need to subtitle the videos and re-render the figures, which we will do shortly. Let us know if you find some errors.

You can switch back and forth between the Spanish and English version on our website by clicking on the Chilean or American Flag on the top of our website. ¡Bienvenidos!

Marzullo TC, Gage GJ (2012) The SpikerBox: A Low Cost, Open-Source BioAmplifier for Increasing Public Participation in Neuroscience Inquiry. PLoS ONE 7(3): e30837. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030837

So, we’ve never worked beyond the working prototype stage of the manipulator as it was just too hard to produce reliably. Until today. Those “in the know” are familiar with a new technology that is taking over the hacker/Maker scene: The MakerBot! It’s a consumer grade 3D printer that allows you to design objects in programs in SketchupUp, Rhino, or AutoDesk 123 and print them on your tabletop device. Few technologies have we witnessed over the past few years that are as exciting as this one. With the MakerBot, we were able to reduce the number of pieces (not counting screws) from 21 to 5, and assembly time from a week to half a day and decreasing. Here’s what it looks like, with a video.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Compare it to one of our earlier prototypes from ~two years ago.

We shipped this first production unit to our friends Mohsen Omrani and Ethan Hemming at Queen’s University at Kinston, Ontario, who are testing it in their undergraduate neuroscience lab course. We have 1-2 more design tweaks to implement, and then we plan to begin offering it for sale in 2-4 weeks, first in preassembed form and eventually in kit form (both will be priced similarly to the SpikerBox). Stay tuned! And yes, as with our all inventions, this is open-source. We will post all our .stl files and schematics so you can print it on your own 3D printer if you like.

We want to thank our new colleague Tiburcio De La Carcova for helping tremendously with the design and production over the last intense two weeks as we raced to complete the unit in time for Mohsen. Tiburcio is a lifelong hardware freak and co-founder of videogame company Atakama Labs in Santiago, Chile.

Though we haven’t formally announced it yet, we are currently spending some time back-and-forth between Michigan and Chile on a “StartUp Chile” fellowship to bring neuroscience to the schools and students of South America. Notably, this manipulator was “Hecho en Chile” in a brand new hackerspace Tiburcio is building to encourage invention in Santiago. ¡Viva la NeuroRevolucion! Tú vas a ver más español en nuestro sitio web en breve……

We brought the prototype to SfN; Stefan brought the special flies. Here at Backyard Brains we believe in real-time posters, so if you came by, you would seen us explaining how the prototype worked while Stefan was busy preparing the fruitfly larva for recording. Below Nature reporter Ewen Callaway talks to Stefan as he tries to use our micro-rig.

Ewen subsequently wrote a nice blog post on our gear for the Nature News site, but the best treat of all for us was returning to “Neuropod,” the Nature Neuroscience podcast. We were on the podcast three years ago when we first tried to present our gear and nothing worked. But we kept hacking away, and now, with all our gear fully operational, we were happy to bring the first spikes recorded live on Neuropod!

As astute listener may wonder why you only hear the standard cockroach leg spikes on the podcast. Where are the fruitfly muscle recordings? Weren’t we also talking about some optogenetic device? Show the data! We admit, it was still relatively early in the day when we spoke with Ewen, and Stefan was still trying to get his dissection right (he remarked the monocular microscope made the dissection difficult, and he would have preferred the gooseneck dissection lights to be longer. Noted for Gen4). But Stefan stayed focused, and at 2 PM Sunday afternoon we successfully recorded the critical piece of data: the electromyogram from the fruitfly muscle during presentation of blue light. It’s noisy, but in the recording below you can hear the increased activity from the muscle at ~2 seconds when Stefan turned on the blue light. The blue light caused the cholinergic motor neurons to depolarize, resulting in muscle contraction.

Expect us to release the designs for the micromanipulator (you could 3D print it yourself!) and LED control circuit in a month or so.

It was a busy SfN for us, as we also ran a symposium on “Low Cost Neuroscience” with our colleagues Bruce Johnson from Cornell, Jeff Wilson from Albion, a high school teacher from the D.C. area, Raddy Ramos from New York Institute of Technology, our friend Stefan, and our keynote speaker Ben Robbins, a 6th grader from Novi Meadows Middle School. Mr. Robbins taught the audience how to successfully do outreach to 5th graders. We don’t have access to age data of presenters at SfN, but we would venture to guess Mr. Robbins may have been the youngest presenter ever for the society.

Scientists, with their huge intellect and famous experiments, can sometimes be intimidating to approach. Thus, we were a bit cautious and sheepish when we asked Mr. Robbins if he would let us take a picture with him. Thankfully, he was cool with it.

Photo by Jeff Wilson

You can watch Mr. Robbins’ talk below in all its lo-fi hand held camera glory. Don’t worry, the shaking slows down about 20 seconds in.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Our good friend Moheb Costandi also wrote a detailed summary of the symposium for the Dana Foundation. Stay tuned in the months to come as we release more inventions!

While most of us were enjoying our relaxing summer vacations, our developer Nate was hard at work porting our Backyard Brains mobile application to the Android platform.  We have just released our first version to the Android Market, and Yes! it’s a free download.  We are happy to now add the android phones to our growing list of supported devices for Backyard Brains data analysis.

For those that are interested in helping out in the future development of application or just interested in learning JAVA, we have released the source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) license. You can get access to all of our source code on Github: https://github.com/BackyardBrains/Backyard-Brains-Android-App.

This is an early release (0.1b), so it only provides limited capabilities for now. But it does the most important thing. It allows you to see Spikes on the Android! See photo below, (that’s Nate’s hand). Watch for updates in the Market Place, as we will soon be adding more functionality.

Don’t forget to install our application from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.backyardbrains. Happy spikes!

“I wanted to write to let you know that the summer program ended today and the students had a blast working with the RoboRoach kits.  These last few weeks they were so enthused that they were getting to campus and starting to work before I even came in.”

There was a brief write-up today in the New York Times, but, more interestingly, the students made their own website summarizing their results. Their chief findings were:

1) The cerci nerves adapt more slowly to the stimulation than the antenna nerves. Also, stimulating cerci enables forward motion (our current antennal prep only allows right and left).

2) Randomizing the stimulation to the antenna nerves by using music patterns (instead of the constant 55 Hz stimulation we have set on the circuit) causes habituation to occur more slowly as well.

Thus, a three channel stimulator, with more heterogeneous stimulation patterns, would enable a RoboRoach system with forward, left, and right turning control that adapts more slowly. Nice work students! Impressive! Can we join your lab?

Our current efforts on the RoboRoach are to make the circuit lighter and reduce assembly time. Our current production version (gen3) weighs 6.25 g, an improvement from our first (9 g) and second (8 g) prototypes. It still takes about 6 hours to build however, so we are researching circuit configurations and interconnects that take less time to assemble and test.

Ashton Powell – Teacher/Educator. Ashton joins the team for the summer of 2011 to help build the curricula for High School teachers. One of our weakness has been supplying teachers with the tools they need to build a lesson plan around neuroscience and electrophysiology. Ashton has his Ph.D. in neuroscience and is currently a teacher at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. As a previous customer of Backyard Brains, he has used the SpikerBox in his classrooms and challenged his students to design experiments. We look forward to the upcoming tools for teachers later this year!

Cristina Mezuk – Illustrator. Although we always pride ourself on our self-generated content, we are also aware that perhaps more detailed drawings may make things easier to understand. We were very lucky to find a local artist, Cristina Mezuk, to help us turn our initial drawings into professional illustrations. Cristina is a photographer and artist (you can check out the website of her work) that is helping us make our educational materials much more informative. See below for a few examples.

Zachary King – iPhone Developer. Zak comes to Backyard Brains via the Biomedical Engineering BME450 Design Class. Zak and his colleagues were working on an early prototype of the optogenetics kit that is still in development. Zak developed the iPhone interface and circuit to control the timing of a bright LED stimulus. He is currently working to improve the iPhone app written by Alex Wiltschko with some cool new features. Zak’s first update (version 1.7) will appear on the iTunes store in the weeks to come.

Nathan Dotz – Android Developer, Linux Hacker. You spoke, we listened. After all of our talk of being an open hardware and software company, we have heard your concerns about our lack of support for the open Android system. We are happy to have Nathan Dotz join our team to help us build an application for your Android mobile devices. As an talented hacker active in the All Hands Active Maker Space in Ann Arbor, Nathan is already really good at making hardware and software as cheap as possible. Nathan hopes to also develop a browser-based version of the app in the future.

Above: A tale of two platforms. What makes them different makes them great.