Goal of the project

This project was done at the Hackuarium association, a DIY biology hacking-space and open laboratory located in Ecublens (Switzerland). Feel free to contact us if you would like additional information or would like to buy a fully built and tested bioreactor.

Recently, the open-source and open-hardware community has been involved in the creation of open scientific tools. In this context, a few bioreactor projects emerged. However, none of them was sufficiently evolved to be casually used in a laboratory. It is for this reason that we started this project. Our goal was to create a simple bioreactor that measures and controls temperature, weight agitation, food input/output, and the option add more modules to read others variables like pH, conductivity, do spectrophotometry, etc. In addition, the tool had to be reliable, precise and cheap.

The initial idea was that you could use bioreactors without having to buy an expensive instrument. The device is rather cheap, for you can buy all the components on AliExpress (but one) and either 3D print or laser cut the case (MDF or acrylic glass). When constructing 10, the price per bioreactor is around $30. However, if you want to have a final product with an aluminium case and PCBs already assembled, the cost would rather be $90 each if you order 20 of them.