• The community is actively improving its knowledge infrastructure: they debated migrating diyhpl.us/wiki to a MediaWiki front-end with Monobook CSS for familiarity, while lamenting the splintering caused by a new wiki.transhumani.com site that duplicates goals but offers richer default features.

• A fully open-source orbital shaker for cell-culture perfusion was showcased: 3-D-printable hardware that fits inside a 37 °C/5 % CO₂ incubator, runs on a 100-line Arduino sketch, and was originally designed to perfuse 3-D-printed sugar vasculature templates that dissolve in ~10 min to create microfluidic channels.

• Scaling and adoption challenges for open lab hardware were dissected: uniform orbital motion for 16×6-well plates is the next design target, but lack of UL certification, manual firmware uploads, and academic purchasing biases toward expensive brand-name gear remain major barriers.

• Low-cost optical instrumentation links were shared, including openspectrometer.com and Public Laboratory’s Spectral Workbench (webcam + DVD diffraction grating), framed against commercial spectrometer prices (NanoDrop ≈ $8 k) to highlight the economic case for DIY alternatives.

• DIYbio regulatory and cultural issues surfaced: diybio.eu’s new regulatory-affairs page and a Nature Scitable article on placenta-derived stem cells for citizen science were circulated, while participants argued that an “arxiv for biology” already exists (e.g., PLOS) and that cultural acceptance, not technology, is the bottleneck.

• Practical control-systems advice was offered: for a 400 W Peltier heater controlling 1 L of water/glycerol, a simple P-controller is likely sufficient and far easier to tune than full PID, illustrating the trade-off between performance and engineering effort in open hardware projects.