Niko Packbier

ColonyPicker: a hobby robot arm that picks microbial colonies, guided by Meta SAM 3.1 and Muse Spark Picking colonies is a daily lab task: find a single colony on an agar plate, touch it with a sterile needle, and transfer it to its own well so it grows as a pure culture. It’s done by hand or by commercial colony pickers. Those machines weigh close to a ton, cost more than $100,000, and often run detection software that hasn’t changed in decades. This project shows utilizing META AI, anyone can repurpose basically any robot to automate this task in their own labs without needing a dedicated machine with antique software. For this project I literally build a homelab. I got yeast extract and agar, clarified nutrient medium and poured plates in the kitchen to grow my girlfriends sourdough starter into isolated colonies that can be detected and picked. Normally the vision pipeline is the hardest part, but SAM 3.1 basically worked out of the box. The hardware was the challenge, from the cheap webcams to the really underspeced servos. In the end it came together as a testimony to the fact that any body with an AI subscription can now stick it to the big colony picker corpos. (Colony pickers are actually very niche equipment made by not-that-large companies, but I didn't like their service so this is me sticking it to the man, one sewing needle at a time)