FlyBox Redesign

For my senior capstone project, I worked on a team of Olin students in collaboration with Brandeis University to redesign a piece of laboratory equipment called the FlyBox. The FlyBox was designed by Brandeis to monitor and track the behavior of fruit flies over multi-day periods for circadian rhythm research. Using specific lights in the FlyBox, researchers were able to use optogenetics to control individual neurons in the flies' brains and see how their sleep patterns changed. The device was created to replace existing methods of fruit fly behavior observation, offering more detailed and accurate data at a lower cost. Already, the FlyBox has been used to generate data for Nobel Prize-winning research on the circadian rhythm. However, the original version of the FlyBox was just a prototype. It lacked the durability and polish needed for long term use. Furthermore, Brandeis wished for the FlyBox to be created from a simple open source kit, able to be assembled by anybody. In a kit form, the FlyBox could be shared and used by partner institutions around the world. The goal of this project was to redesign the FlyBox from a functional prototype into a polished product that was more robust, able to be assembled from a kit, and be user friendly.

Original FlyBox (left) and FlyBox after our redesign (right)

My main contributions to this project were more on the administrative side as well as on the testing and assembly aspects of the project. I was the business manager for this project. I was in charge of purchasing things for the team, making sure every item we purchased was recorded, maintaining our budget, communicating with Olin's financial affairs team, etc. This took up a lot of my time initially as, while the team was in the prototyping phase, we were ordering things constantly. Eventually, things calmed down a bit as we started to realize what designs had potential and what specific materials we needed to buy. Throughout this whole initial process, I didn't really take the lead on any of the prototyping or design projects, instead acting as a helper for everyone else. This put me in a really good position to take on a testing role as I had a less in-depth knowledge of the engineering than anyone else on the team at that point. I was effectively our first line of testing to make sure that what we were actually developing could be assembled, operated, and maintained by people without intimate knowledge of the behind the scenes engineering. Most of my work in the second half of the project was user testing our FlyBox design, recording what could/needed to be improved, and either making that happen myself or communicating those changes to whoever needed to get them. I also took an active role in writing the extensive documentation package that came with our FlyBox. This included assembly instructions, troubleshooting steps, and general documentation outlining what engineering choices we made and why.

Check out the following links to see more about this project as well as the parts my teammates worked on:

FlyBox Github Repo
Our Olin College SCOPE project page
Brandeis Rosbash Lab