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.

This operation has been a labor of love for us (working out of our living rooms and mother-in-law’s basement), and after 2.5 years of plugging away, we announce we are now ready to expand our team. We were recently awarded an NIMH SBIR grant: “Bringing Neurophysiology into Secondary Schools” to allow us to professionalize all our educational materials as well as build some new prototypes. We are currently recruiting to add a software developer and educator to our team. We thank the U.S. National Government for believing in our mission, and, of course, you the taxpayer!

And we want to thank you with more than a kind word. For the summer, we announce our first sale. The SpikerBox and Bag of Parts prices have now been lowered 10% to get neurophysiology into the hands of more and more people. We shall keep experimenting with production techniques to continue making neuroscience inquiry as affordable as possible.

To the NeuroRevolution!

-Tim & Greg

Above is our total revenue since we started taking sales. In 2010 we took in $25,000 in sales of SpikerBoxes (and another $3,850 in grants/awards). Where did this money go? Were we good stewards of our new-found wealth? Or did we give cash bankruptcy bonuses to our top execs? It’s up to you to judge. Below you will find the top 10 expenses for all of 2010. Note that a majority of our expenses were directly related to the procurement and distribution of our SpikerBoxes.

We did have an expensive trip to San Diego for SfN, but fortunately this was graciously covered by the Anuradha Rao Memorial Travel Award and SFN Next Generation Award. A clever reader may be wondering where our payroll expenses are on this report. It’s not there, because in 2010 we had no payroll. One of our owners (Tim) was reimbursed for personal loans made to the business in 2010, but it wasn’t until this year that he actually started to earn the extravagant full-time salary of $1,500 a month!

We look forward to growing our business in 2011 and offering more products and experiments to feed your hungry brain (RoboRoach available now, and some opto thing-a-ma-genetic-jig may be on the horizon). Stay tuned, and don’t forget to check in on us from time-to-time to see how we are doing. Our minds recollect an old lolcatz cartoon…

Karl drove a hard package, but ultimately agreed to a 2002 silver Ford Focus for travel from Palo Alto and a salary of $45,000/year, along with an undisclosed amount to renovate Michigan Central Station as his new lab space. To the shock of many local politicians, Crain’s Detroit is reporting that talks between Sequoia Capital and Manuel J. Moroun are commencing to negotiate the transformation of the train station into a cutting edge neuroscience institution. Karl has also negotiated equity in Backyard Brains, with a cap of 0.5% ownership vesting over 10 years.

The future home of the Central Station Neural Labs in Corktown

Karl notes: “I have long been a fan of the Motor City. A couple weeks ago, after I had just published my recent Nature Paper on the mechanisms of anxiety, I went for a walk on the west side of Stanford campus, passing the Dayglo mountain bikers and triathlete med students. On such a beautiful sunny Spring California Day as is every day out here, my thoughts were grey and cloudy. I thought, "Karl, it’s time for a challenge. You just published 12 Science and Nature papers in almost as many months, and no one has ever done that before. You should be happy. Why aren"t you? Karl further noted: "To tell you the truth, it was hard to become excited anymore, even with all the grants coming in, all the world class talent of graduate students and post-docs banging on my door, the bombshell papers I keep writing and writing… it all felt a bit sisyphean to me. What more can life offer?"

"I needed to find something new, but what would I work on that would ignite the fire? And what could I add? I soul-searched for weeks." Karl paused a moment to check something funny on the MSU basketball internet forum before continuing…"Late one night, as I was writing a Nature article on the mechanism of the neocortex’s storage of declarative long term memory in humans, and another Science paper that finally answers whether or not we have free will, I became intellectually bored, and began surfing my favorite tech sites thedenveregotist.com and the dailymail.co.uk, when something immediately caught my eye. What’s this? A Remote Control Cockroach in Michigan? No way! This project is just asking for optogenetics! I pulled out my Rolodex, gave Tim and Greg a call, and before I knew it, I had arranged a 30 year mortgage on a nice fixer-upper townhouse right off Telegraph and 11 mile, just commuting distance to Detroit, but of course, not as expensive as living in the city itself."

Tim and Greg happily pose with their first hire! There's always a line at Slows!

Rick Synder, governor of Michigan, noted: “We need the kind of "can do attitude" in Michigan that leads to new technologies, which Deisseroth has repeatedly demonstrated with his harvesting of green algae and desert bacteria ion pumps.” Mayor David Bing has expressed interest in expanding the people mover service to the new Central Station Neural Labs (CSNL) to accommodate the increased traffic.

"I am excited about heading to the D, just in time for baseball", said Deisseroth, adjusting his ballcap. "I’m looking forward to see Jackson build on his incredible rookie season [...] With Cabrera and Guillen healthy in the lineup, and Verlander and Porcello looking good in the rotation… I like our chances." When asked how he felt that his start date (April 8th) coincides with opening day for Tigers, Karl said with a wry smile: "I think I feel a sickness coming on next week… but I should be better by the following Monday".

His new optogenetics center, located across the street from Slow’s BBQ, is speculated to become the new hotbed of ideas. The owners of Buck’s of Woodside have reportedly been spotted in Roosevelt Park speaking with Phil Cooley. Jeff DeBruyn, whose non-profit ‘Imagination Station’ owns several buildings and vacant land around the new facility, has seen an unprecedented amount of activity on his sites. Wheelhouse Detroit has inquired with city officials to build a new bike shop which will capitalize on the shift to a younger, more mobile demographic in the area.

Backyard Brains released its official statement today, which reads "Please join us as Detroit and Backyard Brains welcomes Karl to his new home in the state of Michigan. We are looking forward to Karl building on his 13-year experience at Stanford by bringing Neuroscience to the people. We are cautiously optimistic to see what Karl has in store in the years to come."

UPDATE: May 9th, 2011

After four weeks of work, Karl unveiled to his new supervisors his brand new optogenetic prototype. Design Reviews are brutal….

Karl also received his official business cards! Feel free to contact him for tech support!

We gave a seminar recently on Feb. 25th to the undergraduate students at Grand Valley State University (thanks for the invite John and Merritt!), and we publicly unveiled a working prototype! Samara Woolfolk andStewart Berkos were the first eager students to try it out, and they agreed it worked. We believe in crowd-based peer review of real-time experiments. Being in pure speaking mode, we didn’t take any pictures or videos of the event, but here is Samara and Stewart posing after lunch…

And below is a movie of a basement experiment… Are you convinced?

We plan to offer the RoboRoach as a beta product soon. Stay tuned! In the meantime, we need to do a couple more experiments to ensure:

1) the wires stay in the antenna (principal failure point).

2) the preparation works reliably (at present we only get evoked movement in ~25% of our preps (n=30)…we are working hard to figure out the causes).

Let us know if you have any suggestions/advice! To the NeuroRevolution!

We offer door to door bus service:

We have found that small hands are optimal for cutting the circuit boards:

Taking a hint from our friends at Hewlett-Pakard (recent firing decision aside), we use a form of paired production call “extreme soldering.” Such a method allows us to find errors early, and reduces quality control costs.

We have also found we can increase savings by having employees share a pair of shoes, and observing a strict “no TV distraction” policy.

One unexpected benefit of having young staff is that they are not socially sophisticated enough to develop passive-aggressive tendencies, which are hard to spot but devastating to production for most companies. We can easily tell when morale is low.

We address morale problems by reassigning staff to cockroach husbandry when appropriate.

At the recent MAKER faire in Detroit, editor-in-chief of MAKE Magazine, Mark Frauenfelder, selected us as his favorite Makers on Boing-Boing. Thanks Mark! See below for some budding neuroscientists.

Finally, we are collaborating with the Fund Science folks, to allow you, yes you, to contribute to research projects. Wonder when you do those 5K runs for cancer, where the money goes? Here you directly know. Donations to Backyard Brains would go towards paying educators to help develop our lab books and hiring coders to improve and update our iPhone/iPad educational software. A recent article in nature.com speaks about this funky new concept. Don’t worry, rest assured we at Backyard Brains are decidedly poor (not paying ourselves yet); you’re not donating to a company like AIG, which you already did, in a round-about way.

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….

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!

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….