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Comment by ed_ | Hacker News Reader

We're working on "life support systems" for algae photobioreactors. This includes monitoring the health of the algae, monitoring and controlling the environment to optimise algae growth, providing feedback to users on growth and experiment progress, and uploading data to our own cloud.

We're more software than hardware, but without the hardware capability we wouldn't have been able to attempt it.

Previously we tried little "Singing Christmas Trees" as well [0], and while they were certainly nifty, we couldn't find the market for them at the price.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@pixolighting

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That's super cool! I worked last year on an algae bioreactor. I was growing chlorella in plastic bottles in my room, just for the heck of it. That year I also met some people working for a University of Edinburgh startup using algae to consume the tails from whiskey production. Honestly, I really hope that algaes see a wider adoption in consumer and business processes, because they're really fun and fascinating organisms.

Out of curiosity, are you looking for interns? I can work in the UK and the US. If you have contact information of some kind, I can send you my resume!

That sounds really interesting. I'm afraid we're not looking for interns immediately, but the next phase of the project will require more people and square-footage. My email's in my profile, let me know!

Do you recall the game(?) 'LIGHT BRIGHT'

Which consisted of a black-cardboard-paper with a pattern on it connect-the-dots-style - and you would plug into each 'dot' a plastic pin, then it would light-up at you would see the pattern/design in full form?

Imagine your xmas trees as a grid of LEDs and they are pressable/de-pressable (toggle) and kids can draw out a pattern, then have the machine animate the pattern in certain ways... as it understands the intent of the drawing as being a car/tree/person/animal whatever...

We did look at the idea of letting people arbitrarily arrange a string of LEDs then somehow map the sub-models to the new positions (which LEDs are "left eye open", which are "mouth shape E", etc.), but we couldn't find an LED string we liked that was both cheap and individually-addressable.

Also on the drawing board was some sort of "tiles" of letters which would be be rearranged by the user and illuminated in a fixed grid, then have different messages light up like a wordsearch. It could also be used to make those "word clocks" that are out there, that spell out "it is half past four" for example.

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