This project has been divided into several parts: 3D printing, Heating Element Manufacturing, PCB Ordering, Circuit Building, and Assembly. Some of the lessons learned that I can share is to understand how all these parts tie and work together. It will help during the assembly phase because we can estimate the length of the jumpers and where the jumpers would fit in the housing. The important lesson learned for me is to wrap the heating element properly with the Nichrome wire and the Polyimide tape. The heating element is quite small, so it would be favorable to wrap everything neatly to avoid a bulky part to fit into a small space. Make sure to measure the length from the heating element to the PCB, in order to find or create the appropriate length of the jumpers. Long jumpers would not fit into the wire holders built at the back of the cartridge.

During the project, we had various challenges due to a lack of experience. However, we were able to overcome them by putting in time and effort as a team. As a team member, I was in charge of 3 D Printing Case, Cooling elements(Printing customized 3D fan blade), and ordering Emission, and Excitation filters. The other subprojects were Heating Element (drilling the holes on the aluminum rod), Circuit Building, and PCB (Printed Circuit Board) Ordering. I had an opportunity to improve my social networking skills by effectively communicating with other team colleagues, TAs, Mentor, and Dr. Wheeler through emails, meetings, and presentations. My favorite part of this project was printing a 3D Case for a DIY qPCR thermocycler. Designing a different faceplate for the ease of transferring data into a laptop and possibly powering the prototype would be the next step.

When I started this project I had a very simple understanding of the DNA assembly process and had never even worked with a thermocycler before. We spent countless hours researching DNA assembly, lab technologies, and how we could design something that would help our mentor assemble DNA more effectively and efficiently. After learning much of the foundational concepts and processes involving the DNA tests being done in our lab, we were ready to begin building our prototype. My favorite part of this project was being able to actually get hands-on experience building something from scratch. I specialized on the electronics part of our prototype, and I absolutely loved the process of building something from scratch: starting with a number of electronic components, understanding how they were built and the purposes of each of their pins in affecting their functionality, seeing how they should be wired together, learning how PCBs work and how a circuit diagram could be transferred to a PCB, learning how to solder, and being able to troubleshoot the electronics when they didn't work as expected. Since our project was a DIY, things didn't always fit together perfectly, so I had many on-the-spot opportunities to problem solve and troubleshoot, whether it be making modifications to the design, reattaching unstable wires, testing component polarity, and confirming the PCB soldering didn't short the circuit. I also learned how to work with my team to delegate tasks, maintain organization, clearly communicate, and have fun as we learned together!

Thanks to our mentor, the TAs, and Dr. Wheeler, we were able to put together the various parts and present our prototype. I learned the protocols of 3D printing, from importing models to adjusting the parameters and debugging the code. The project assembled the following main parts into a working prototype of a DIY thermocycler: 3D printed case, heating and cooling elements, emission and excitation filters, circuits, and the PCB. Thanks to our mentor, the TAs, and Dr. Wheeler, we were able to put together the various parts and present our prototype. In the future, designing a different faceplate to transfer data quickly and adding more cartridge housings to conduct multiple experiments at one time would be the next step of this project. As a team, we worked together to overcome various challenges, improved our communication skills, and learned to work with team members with different skills and backgrounds.

Really learned a lot from this precious experience! Before I only believe knowledge is the most important element to succeed in a project. Thanks to our mentor and my teammates, I noticed the importance in communication, planning, and organization. On the aspect of "new things", I learned a lot of engineering knowledge as an bioinformatics major. I enjoyed how we sit together, merely staring at circuits and stuff, thinking about how to solve the problem and finally figuring out! Since the project started from scratch, we had to gather background information from different research article. We splited through different subprojects while this divide and conquer strategy really pushed through the project smoothly. I learned about 3d printing, circuits, PCB boards, drilling and cutting metals. It is great fun! PS: I really had a good practice for my English(communication skill).