GMU:DIY Biolab “Driver’s License”/Christian Wiegert

Introduction

For my introductory course in the Biolab I decided to focus on plants and especially on growing them under artificial circumstances. I split my experimentations in two parts: 1:Growing plants under very artificial light and 2:Growing plants under very artificial circumstances

Ideas

1:Growing plants under very artificial light

Set up several boxes to grow plants under artificial light. Vary color, duration or other aspects of the light and see, if it changes anything in the growing of plants.

2:Growing plants under very artificial circumstances

Grow plants in different substitues for soil, e.g. agar-agar-murishage-skoog-medium and see how they do.

Experiment

1:Growing plants under very artificial light

Day 0

I build and set up a box, seperated in 4 sections. Each section containing one 1 Watt LED to support the inhabitants with light. The boxes have fans, so the air inside will be interchanged from time to time. To control the amount and - for the first experiment - the duration of the light and the fans i wrote a little script that is running on an arduino. this script also counts the time (and in case of a powerdrain stores this information on the eeprom).

For the first part I did not do controlled watering, i just gave them water by hand.

I set up the box in my shared-working-room, which was probably not the best idea, as people there tend to be heating a lot, which results in very dry air.