LiveCode in The Lab

I had the pleasure of hearing from long time LiveCoder, Larry Walker, in regards to his recent successes with LiveCode. This is his story.

Thanks to a referral from the director of my local MakerSpace, I was contacted awhile back by a small, 2-person gene-splicing lab. Maybe not a typical potential client for most LiveCoders, but my town (home to the University of Wisconsin) is a hot-bed of genetics research and spin-off starts-ups, so no big surprise.

They had a problem: they routinely need to do 18-hour to 3-day runs of a fermenter, in which a genetically-modified bacteria is grown in bulk. As the bacteria multiply, it is extremely important to deliver nutrients at precisely the right rate: too slow and the bacteria will stop multiplying, too fast and they get fat and lazy and produce undesired by-products (to grossly over-simplify).

That has tended to mean that someone has to baby-sit the fermenter around the clock, to continually monitor and adjust the feeding rate. They had heard about these cool little things called Arduinos, and wondered if one might be programmed to do a precise exponential feeding schedule (to match the exponential growth rate of well-fed bacteria).

I assured them that was no big problem, but that the issue with Arduinos was their lack of any cheap and easy-to-code user interface. And, of course, immediately proposed that I build a LiveCode front-end to control the Arduino that would control the pump…

So I pulled out the sample code from my Talking To Arduinos presentations at RunRevLive and started hacking away. And I built them a little LiveCode desktop (well, laptop) app that does just what they asked for. And it works very nicely: they can stay home and sleep all night now!

Grossly over-simplified and very-short feeding schedule, stopped after 20 seconds.

OK, so Expert Scott Rossi I’m not, but the client could only afford “working”; “pretty” was definitely not in their budget!

LiveCode (plus the supply of LC “building blocks” I had laying around from past projects) meant that I could deliver this app very quickly and at a price that was acceptable to a very small, always cash-squeezed independent lab.

LiveCode meant the difference between doing the project and not being able to afford the project.

And that’s the biggest bonus to working in LiveCode for me: it’s not just great fun, it allows me to bid for and get work that would otherwise be priced out of my clients’ reach. They get valuable tools and I get paying work.

LiveCode Rocks!

We’re so inspired to hear about what Larry did with LiveCode. What’s your LiveCode story? Write us and we’ll feature you here!