03/08/2012 – Pipette Robot

Ben Himmer (Biology teacher and post graduate student) with the assistance of Sam Crookes are constructing an automatic Pipette robot. The robot will dispense micro-litres of yeast into agar plates, 80-100 droplets per plate.

I will ask Ben to provide a more detailed explanation of the research shortly.

The robot will raise and lower a configurable eletronic Pipette with 10 dispensors.

The robot will also use an old flat bed scanner to position the agar plates on one axis. We are hoping to drive the stepper motor with an Arduino micro controller via a stepper motor driver from Sparkfun.

The whole setup will be mounted and confined in a custom acrylic box.

We will make the controller code and any other useful information available to download once the project is completed.