10/26/2022 0 Comments Beam breaks actimeter![]() ![]() Complete the assembly of the grid by fixing the upper halves of the IR panel supports ( Fig. Arrange the four IR panel supports in a square ensuring that the emitter and receiver panels are aligned and face each other ( Fig. In the same manner, insert the receiver panels into the remaining two IR panel supports. One emitter panel should be placed into each of the IR panel supports (i.e. Carefully insert the emitter panels into the bottom halves of the IR panel supports (D01). Due to the size of the workspace of our 3D printer (20 × 20 cm), we printed the parts of IR panel support B in halves which were subsequently joined together with epoxy (see the black parts in Fig. The 3D printed IR panel supports are each composed of top and bottom halves. Says Chagas, “This is what we want: a new generation of African scientists that will train others on the continent.Joy-Compatible Board Arduino ™ MEGA 2560R3 ![]() “I received a lot of positive feedback on the potential for open hardware, which has really motivated me to start working on the next steps.” “It was a great experience for me,” Kumbol says. In February, he was invited to speak about using open-science tools to tackle equipment challenges in Africa at a VIB Core Management Workshop in Leuven, Belgium. Now a PhD student at the Einstein Center for Neurosciences in Berlin, Kumbol has joined the editorial board of HardwareX. He has demonstrated Actifield at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and has built actimeters for the science department there. The resulting paper in HardwareX helped Kumbol to secure funding from the Mozilla Foundation to organize a follow-up workshop last July at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana. Credit: Agnieszka PokrywkaĪt US$122.91, the device is a fraction of the cost of commercial systems, which can amount to $6,000 or more. Mary Twumasi assembles the Actifield, a low-cost device for quantifying animal activity, which she helped to develop using open-source components. As rodents move around in the box, they disrupt the beams and the actimeter counts those events. Kumbol’s Actifield device is an array of infrared light emitters and detectors inside a box, run using a microcontroller made by the open-source developer Arduino. You can repair your equipment if it breaks down, and, even more importantly, adapt it to your local needs.” “If you have the blueprint for a piece of equipment, you can understand how it works. “Open-science hardware is not only important in Africa but all over the world,” Chagas says. It was built using off-the-shelf and 3D-printed components, and dubbed the €100 lab ( A. In one example, TReND in Africa instructor and University of Sussex bioengineer André Maia Chagas joined a team including Prieto-Godino and Baden in 2017 to design a microscope. Courses cover such topics as fly genetics, neuroscience and hardware development. The DIY electronics transforming researchįounded in 2011 by Lucia Prieto-Godino, now at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Sadiq Yusuf at the Uganda Technology and Management University in Kampala and Tom Baden at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, TReND in Africa encourages do-it-yourself research with a focus on low-cost, open-source science. With colleagues Elikplim Ampofo and Mary Twumasi, Kumbol travelled to Cape Town, South Africa, to attend a two-week workshop run by the non-profit organization Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development (TReND) in Africa, which promotes research and education on the African continent. But my department had only one actimeter available, and it was outdated,” Kumbol says. “I needed the actimeter to test for potential drug compounds that could modify behaviour in mice. But for developer Victor Kumbol, then a neuroscience master’s student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, that device, called Actifield, has had an outsized impact.Īctifield is an actimeter, a device that quantifies animal activity ( V. A 2018 article in the journal HardwareX details “an open source hardware setup to measure locomotor activity in rodents”. ![]()
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