AC Dispatcher (ACD) |
An Arduino based device that can take AC or DC signals in inputs, gate it through 6 relays and dispatch them individually to each of the 5 pads of the Electro-Micro-Slide or to the each individual wells of the High Throughput Electro Actuator (HTEA). It is controlled by the Electro Planner We used this device in the screening experiment and most membrane potential related preliminary work |
Description - Rationale |
The AC Dispatcher is the main board behind the experiments that involve exposure of bacteria in liquid
and solid medium to AC current.
It is a shied for an Arduino Nano where 6 relays are used to gate the entering AC or DC signal up to 11V
peak to peak or 11V DC.
This individually gated signal can be dispatched to the High Throughput Electro Actuator (HTEA) or the
Electro-Micro-Slide.
Designed with scalability in mind, the board comes with multiple exposed free and “for debugging” I/O pins for user to augment the capability of the board or to design new extension for further electroshock experiments.
The signal is gated by the DIP05-1A72-12L relay allowing for AC and DC current switching. The
choice of this relay has been mainly inspired by the hardware used in [1].
As the 2 BNC connectors are shorted together, Input Signal can come from either of the BNC Connector.
Connecting 2 input signals could allow to digitally switching between each of them digitally at the
level of the function generator or to generate more complex waveform.
In our work, connected one of the BNC connector to the MHS-2300a dual channel function generator and the other one to an oscilloscope to monitor the waveform
We used it in: |
In our experiments, we used the ACD to gate signals generated by an MHS-2300a dual channel function generator and to dispatch this signal either to the HTEA or the Electro-Micro-Slide
Possible use case |
In our work, we have used the ACD in conjunction with the Electro Planer, the HTEA and the Micro-Electro-Slide. Many other applications remain highly possible.
Tech Specs |
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References |
1. Stratford, J.P. et al. (2019) ‘Electrically induced bacterial membrane-potential dynamics correspond to cellular proliferation capacity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(19), pp. 9552–9557. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1901788116.