Guess who became well acquainted with the lab's 3D printer this week. Almost too acquainted. For one of the graduate student's experiments, over 10 pieces of galvanotaxis apparatus had to be printed, Naturally, as the lab intern, I was first in line for the job. Galvanotaxis is the directional migration of an organism with a change in electric charge, so for this experiment I was to print an apparatus that would make galvanotaxis experiments easier to do with cells. Picture a hockey puck with chambers. That's what I printed. As the graduate student had already designed the apparatus itself, my sole assignment was to print them, so this week, like many of the past weeks, involved a lot of patience and waiting. (This internship has taught me many more valuable lessons than I ever thought it would - an unforeseen aspect of the project for which I am incredibly grateful.) The steps to printing this apparatus were fairly simple:
Repeat this procedure 10 times, and then you have a basic layout of my week at the lab. Besides just printing these cell chambers, however, I did get to "fix" the printer at one point in this week. On the last day of printing, I realized that the printer's bed had been moved to the point where it wasn't level anymore, so it would get stuck and stop printing. As I am one of the two people who uses the printer, and other student asked me to fix it, I had the honor of getting acquainted with the user manual for this particular model. This was, in all honesty, the highlight of my week, because in order to see if I had leveled the bed correctly, I got to print little dinosaurs. On a different note, remember the BioStamp project from Week 2? Its technology has been featured on Tucson News Now. (click below for the link) Thoughts after this week:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHello! I'm Maren, a high school senior and aspiring BME student. My goal is to share my experiences as I dive into the field of Biomedical Engineering. If you have any questions or remarks, please don't hesitate to leave a comment! Archives
April 2017
Categories |