Embroidered LED DNA Helix!
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- čas přidán 16. 03. 2019
- I made a thing! It's an embroidered DNA helix with little LED sequins as the base pairs! This is a slightly different video than normal but I had a lot of fun making this project and I hope you have fun watching as I try and make it work! I don't think I have the skill to become a DIY/Maker CZcamsr quite yet!
Another giant thank you to my Patreon supporters, including my amazing ribosomes:
Marcel Ward
Dave Moore
Christopher Miles
Ben Krasnow
Mathieu Moog
Palle Helenius
Phiroze Dalal
Tim Rhodes
Peter Cook
Brad
Filip
Jerry
Diane & George Dainis
Alexandra Daly
Don Burlone
Tim McNally
Brandon C.
William Pilkington
Kevin Hardesty
Nicholas Tan
Twitter: @AlexDainis
Instagram: Alex.Dainis
Facebook: BiteSciZed
Patreon: / alexdainis
Circuitry Supplies:
LED Sequins: www.adafruit.com/product/3377
Conductive Thread: www.adafruit.com/product/641
Gemma M0: www.adafruit.com/product/3501
Battery Pack: www.adafruit.com/product/727
Music: "Honey" by Bad Snacks
Video produced by Helicase Media LLC (my new science production company!) - Věda a technologie
Hello! An astute viewer has noticed that there is an incorrect A-C base pair labelled in the animation at 3:15! Please forgive my shameful animation proofreading skills! A's bind to T's!!
Wait you're telling me cats don't have sequences of "CATCATCATCAT" in their DNA?
Mostly. Every once in a while they screw up...maybe yours hasn't been caught yet!
That is the best description for a dyi project. "It lights up, mostly, sometimes."
Yes Alex! Putting the A in STEAM big time on this one!
The explanation of the helix with the graphic and hand was great. I really got it trying to understand it.
That is good to hear, thank you! I was trying to figure out how to best show it and I was hoping I had settled on something that worked!
This is a really cool idea. To isolate the wires, you could coating them in a thin layer of epoxy or maybe CA before stitching the next wire. It will probably glue the wires to the fabric which may cause more problems than it solves.
Love your proyect, so cute and smart, and Cool Odd Ana embroidery in the back, S is for Squid!
This video presentation is great! Everything is explained clearly and succinctly. The video graphics production is wonderful. Usually when people wave their hands while speaking, its distracting. Here it is very helpful - especially the left/right hand rotation makes the ambiguous handedness term obvious. I liked the "stitching" led emphasis. Good choice for the fabric paint for the tiny hydrogen bonds. Great job and a successful project!
I was ready to comment "that's really cool" right at the start but after watching all of your figuring out I see that it's even more cool.
Aw, thank you! It was a fun process!
This is the most beautifully nerdy thing I've seen in a very long time. Cheers!
As a general consideration, be aware of maximum current per IO pin of your microcontroller board if you're going to hookup seveal LEDs in parallel to it. It's not like you're going to blow up an IO of a modern microcontroller by overloading it with LED's as ohm's law and LED's IV curve work on your side, but it's not the best idea either way, mostly because you may have issues with poor/unpredictable LED brightness. For this particular GEMMA M0, a very quick read of the datasheet (I may have missed something) shows that its microcontroller isn't particularly generous on the IO current side, giving you 7mA per pin as maximum source current before its output voltage starts dropping significantly.That's about 5 modern high brightness LED's per pin with a comfortable brightness (most small LED's are rated up to 25mA at retina burning brighness level, but they're more than visible enough upwards of 1mA). You got 14 LEDs per pin and it still works and won't blow out, just for the next time it'll be better to distribute them among more pins, and/or connecting them backwards with all the led's + terminal connected to the 3Vo pin (NOT to battery) and the - side of each parallel LED strand to a pin, so you drive a pin high to turn off the LEDs and low to turn them ON. That's because for technical reasons microcontrollers can sink more current than they can source. 10mA in this case (vs 7mA) which gives you 2 more leds per pin. There's also an overall and per IO bank current limit but you're unlikely to hit it with projects like this.
You could also drive more LEDs using an NPN transistor to sink current via the common cathodes.
Thank you!! I did know that I was going a bit high on the LED # side (the datasheet I think even recommended something like only 4-5 per pin) and I did have some variable brightness issues. This is great to know for next time!
Cool idea!
Molecular biology
+
electronics
+
coding
+
embroidery?
Because of things like that you will be one the first creators I will support on Patreon as soon as I set mine up (probably by the end of the month)
You are too kind, thank you! I am happy that you also enjoy that equation of cool things!
Gotta love that comma PhD.
As for what I'd like to see more of, how you apply or use programs/how you use code to accomplish things would be cool to see. I say this as a mathematics person who is interested in seeing examples of programs being used to manage computational tasks.
Congratulations on a great result of this project that you did! Must have taken a while to figure it all out and I can totally understand how excited and proud you must be to do something this exciting which require many different skills!
Love this project, so great seeing a scientist get into the crafting/making side of things.
You're a wonderful communicator, thanks for teaching me the handedness principle in this video.
I love this so much! What a fun thoughtful project!
This is so cool! The combination electronics and sewing is just brilliant. :)
This is dope! Appreciate the new stuff we're seeing here!
Thank you! I was worried about posting it because it's a little different from some of the other stuff I do, but everyone has been so positive and receptive and I appreciate it!
Show and tell is so much fun :p
Loved this!
What an original idea. It looks amazing and the video puts together the science and the information of how you did everything very nicely. Loved it!
This would be a good gift for my teacher. Great video!
MÉXICO ✔
Alex I enjoy this project. I have a related electro-fabric idea ballet dress and you give me a little bit more inspiration.
Thanks
This is so cool!
Thanks!
Very nice! Maybe I'll make something similar myself!
Wow! So this is how you make science fun! I'm starting engineering pretty soon and I was wondering if there was a way to mix video and science in one. Here it is lol! It was a pleasure meeting you yesterday. awesome content!
how cool is this!! awesome ;)
I studied biology, and since I was a kid I wanted to work with marine biology or something like that, I imagined myself in a coast, if not, in a forest or in other place working with animals. When I was in college I had the opportunity to do a research at an important university here in Mexico and the topic was “marine biology”. I was expecting seeing whales, sharks, fishes at least, but no... I ended up with zooplankton; in the beginning it was rare as it was not what I expected, but then I started to enjoy these tiny creatures and I ended up doing my thesis on a planktonic sea slug family.
But last year my trip took another turn, first, I had to take an extra subject because of the credits, and I chose animal cell culture. It was a wonderful experience! Mostly because everything was new to me and also because the professor was great, she’s one of the best on that area.
And as I hadn’t had enough, I had a problem with my social service and I ended up in a research center of biofuels. Of course I knew the basis of organic chemistry and renewable energies; but I had no idea about how an engine works, the difference between gasoline and diesel, the processes to obtain biodiesel and so on. It’s been almost a year and I’m seriously thinking about doing my master there because I saw an area of opportunity.
To sum up, this wasn’t my plan, but I’m enjoying it. I think biology gives us so much freedom in where we can work that we shouldn’t close our mind to one idea. Of course I’d love to go back to my dream of being a marine biologist, but maybe it can wait a little bit.
"This wasn't my plan, but I'm enjoying it." is a lovely sentiment to have! Thank you for sharing this journey!
I would try a skinny piece of heat shrink tube between the connections, doesn't need to be shrunk, although that might make it easier to sew around. You should be able to find diameters around 1mm, maybe less. Now you've got me thinking; my Mum loves making quilts, maybe I should work with her to make a "glow in the dark" quilt for my niece!
Very cute
Good project
Such a cool project! :)
Thank you!!
This video was not sponsored by AdaFruit, but it's a great demo of how cool their stuff is!
Yeah! I've been really impressed with their stuff for a while but never knew quite where to use it, so it was fun to finally think up a project!
Great mashup of biochem, electronics, software and textiles. Love it!
I wonder if a dab of conductive paint (Adafruit sells some), on the wire that goes over the LED terminal would help reliability.
I think that would be a huge help! Will try that next time!
hidden pun 6'45'': you can load code onto it -> you can load codon to it!
I am the WORST at puns and always miss when I inadvertently make them, so thank you for pointing that out, it made me laugh!
Sick
I too made a thing. A light up LED backboard attachment for partially blind kids. LEDs are swell.
Oh cool! Your thing sounds pretty great!
Staahp this is so great
You are too kind!
I wish I could meet a single lady like you. You are a rarity. Stay awesome
Wonderful ¡¡
How opaque is the weave you're using for embroidering? Perhaps it would be interesting to mount the LED's on the back and create more of a glowing effect? Is it possible to cut some of the fabric underneath embroidered areas to let the light shine through? (-googles- aha! Satin Stitch!) I really like the exposed hardware look of this project though, super Cool!!
Do you have tips for students just starting out in university (undergraduate)
so, this is where and how art meets science.
Very cool project. The French knots look like stars :)
When ever I see so many LEDs I want to control them all separately and do some crazy pattern like streaks going up and down the DNA, but usually it's hard to scale because there are more wires involved and there aren't that many pins on the controlling board. One thing that can help is a demultiplexer which can turn n pins into 2^n pins.
Also a suggestion for future work. Usually a resistor should go in series with the LED to control the current a bit. Your project didn't need them which made it a bit simpler but in general depending on the source voltage and the LED, you should check if the LED can handle it. I've burned out a couple of them while messing with lower resistance :)
If you don't want to calculate it or can't find information about it, you could always get a variable resistor and chose a sacrificial LED to test if it can take max current and if not what it's threshold is. Note: differently colored LEDs can have different thresholds.
Thank you! These little LED sequins came with resistors built in, which I definitely took advantage of (since I didn't have to do it myself). But in future projects this is definitely something I want to play around with, and this is great advice for doing so!
Thanos DNA
Kapton tape is a good insulator for electronics, but there's also "liquid electrical tape" that might've worked best here.. Tiny dabs of solder would help to solidify the connection between the wires and the PCBs the LEDs are on (but obviously you'd need to be careful not to burn the fabric)
Ohh, liquid electrical tape might have been much easier! I will look into that for the future!
A little dab of conductive epoxy on the LED pads once they are sewn in place might beef up their connection to the thread.
That is a great suggestion, thank you!
Wow! That's brilliant, Alex! How many lines of code does it take?
Only 16! Very manageable!
Pretty compact indeed! It's definitely nice to have Python for microcontrollers. During my undergrad years there were only two programming languages available for ATmega chips, C and Assembler.
i would really like to see you playing foldit .. not really diy but still biology and tech related
That could be fun!
I don't think this is much of a fire hazard, if at all, since these LEDs run on something like 3V, and also the little driver board probably isn't capable of supplying lots of Amps into the circuit in case it went short circuit. So the only thing that would probably happen is the circuit stopping to work because some component has given up the ghost, but not really heat up to anywhere near a flamable temperature (which would be way over 100 degrees - Celsius, of course, since we're not in the middle ages any more). So I guess you're pretty safe. You could have tested it by intentionally creating a short circuit, but that would mean that in the worst case, you would have sacrificed one of these µC boards (which are probably not very expensive anyways).
It looks really awesome, but the circuit board on the back would look better I think. And next time have the strand spell out CRISPR.
How did I not think to spell out CRISPR?! Next time!
I thought surely because it was too long of a word. But next time you'll get a bigger stitchy circle thing (that's the official technical term I believe) and you'll be all good. :-)
I know this is very bizarre complement but you look healthy
There's one A-C pair at 3:15. :O
Oh noooooo you're right! I never catch typos in animations, UGH. Thank you for pointing this out!
I see you've run into the problem of dim Ruby red sequins when they are put in parallel with sequins of the other colours. This is because Adafruit puts a 220 ohm resistor in series with the red Led on each sequin which limits the current by more than for the other colours. Non-red sequins just have a current shunt where the series resistor would have been. Adafruit used different resistor values because red LEDs have a lower forward voltage than the other colours.
One way around the dim red issue is to put them in series however this would require much higher voltage driving the Led string - about 3V per sequin. And the microcontroller would still be at 3.3V so you'd need to use transistors to switch the LEDs on and off.
Alternative is to keep red sequins on a separate parallel circuit from the non-red squins. Then put a resistor to limit the current to whichever section is brighter.
I noticed the resistor was different and I wasn't sure why that was! But I actually had a bigger problem with the pink and blue ones being really dim. I was trying to figure out a way to get just those on one circuit and then the green and red on the other, but with the criss-crossing of the helix I don't think that my skill level was going to accomplish that in any reasonable fashion. But maybe my problem was the red ones all along? I will definitely keep these suggestions in mind for next time, thank you!
@@AlexDainisPhD The problem of uneven dimming should only be noticeable if there are too many sequins on one Gemma output pin, or if the Gemma is being under powered for example by a dying battery. If you stick to Adafruit's guidelines you should not see a problem.
Have a look at Becky Stern's videos for more tips of sewable electronics.
@@bornach Yeah, I definitely went beyond their guidelines by a bit... but yes, I watched a lot of Becky's videos! They were immensely helpful, and I think with what I've learned now trying this project out for first time I'll be able to revisit them with more knowledge and better implement her advice next time!
All other things being ideal (basically, source voltage being constant), IF all the LED's on a parallel strand have an individual series resistor, then it doesn't matter which ones are in parallel with which which ones, they all would light up exactly as if they were connected individually. But as this world isn't ideal and your microcontroller's IO pins have internal resistance (thus the current limit), then things get more complicated, as the more you load each pin the lower its output voltage, and that non-linearly affects the current through each LED. That's more pronnounced with Gallium Nitride LEDs (basically every high brightness non-red LED) because they work at higher voltages and your microcontroller works at 3.3V, which isn't even enough to drive these LEDs at full brightness (not recommnended anyway if you value your retinas). As a rule of thumb, if you need to parallel LEDs this way, group them into GaN and non-GaN ones (reds and all other colors, or in three groups of reds, greens and all other colors if you're high on LED #) and distribute them so that there's fewer per pin of the non-red ones and more per pin of the red ones. Also, using a 5V microcontroller would help if you want to go bright. Whites and pinks count as blue LEDs because that's what they really are under the hood. Cool project!
Hey Alex, using addressable RGB LEDs would allow you to change the sequence or even scroll an entire genome. For more e-textile ideas, or if you ever want to make a commercial product, check out ZSK: czcams.com/video/wIVCDS8fYmk/video.html
You are so beautiful and impressive.
Next time you should insulate with hot glue instead of tape.
I will try that!
You are so cute
First!
Here's to a long life and a merry one. A quick death and an easy one. A pretty girl and an honest one. A cold pint and another one!
You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.
Just a couple Irish proverbs for St. Patrick's Day.
"You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind." is one I *really* need to take to heart sometimes!
@@AlexDainisPhD good advice always, especially on St. Patrick's Day.
"Handedness"? 🤨 Come on, I'm sure you know the term _chirality_ . You don't need to dumb it down; your audience are smart.
You could have forgone the tape by using insulated wires (that have a thin resin film; not the kind wrapped in fat plastic).