Week 3 Lab: Opentron Gel Art

This week’s lab was about getting familiar with cuttind-edge lab automation tools. We were introduced to the Opentron, which to me was a close relative to 3d printing hardware and other gantry based fabrication method. It runs on a python script indicating coordinates for the working head to go-to, and has a pump and a motor where you would imagine the filament extruder motor and the heating element to be in a standard FDM 3d printer. Really enjoyed using this cool device.

Thanks to Ronan Donovan’s awesome online tool, we could bypass the scripting using a simple UI that translated our graphics into the code itself, very similar to what a slicer software does for an STL file to a 3D printer or what a CAM engine does for a STEP file for CNC operations.