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Welcome to the MicroLab development wiki. This is where you can find the latest status details and priorities for the MicroLab and its features.
The MicroLab is a DIY controlled lab reactor (CLR) that you can build with 3d printed and off-the-shelf parts for less than a thousand dollars.
As of release v0.6.0 in late 2024, the MicroLab's base features are complete. This means it can stir, maintain temperature, and add reagents at appropriate times according to a pre-programmed recipe file. While this does allow some chemistry and functional testing to be performed, there are additional features and testing necessary before it has full parity with commercial CLRs.
A major goal of this wiki is to provide details on planned features so that (1) replicators can easily see what's possible with the current version and (2) hardware and software developers can easily find the next priorities to work on.
The image above shows the planned features for each MicroLab release up to the "final" version 1.0. There are no timelines as this is a volunteer project - it moves when contributors move it. More details about the features in the roadmap can be found in the requirements pages below.
There are several sets of requirements for the MicroLab:
- Chemistry requirements - What a chemist will want from the machine. These are the big-picture requirements that relate to the chemistry it will ultimately support.
- Software requirements - Priorities for UX, software reliability, i18n, and other software priorities.
- Hardware requirements - Priorities for hardware design, printed part design, and BOMs.
This section is preliminary. As of January 2025, there are no completed and published MicroLab recipes for synthesizing active pharmaceutical ingredients. Metformin and Sofosbuvir have been successfully replicated in our labs and draft recipes exist, but we have not yet published instructions for general production in the MicroLab. We are also conducting materials testing to ensure that the MicroLab parts (especially the Rector Core) have the appropriate chemical and thermal properties to handle long reactions like these.
A complete recipe will entail the following:
- README
- Overview of the API, its applications, and its synthesis
- Required MicroLab features and tolerances (temperatures and solvents!)
- Contraindications, compounding overview, tips, tricks, and other details
- Research
- Literature related to the API's clinical applications
- Literature related to the API's synthesis
- Literature related to the API's compounding
- Synthesis
- Documents about the synthesis pathways for the API
- Recipes
- MicroLab recipe file(s)
- Verification
- Documents related to verifying the API
- Various analytical methods
- Compounding
- Documents related to compounding, storing, and ingesting the API
In addition to the MicroLab itself and its recipes, we also have a suite of auxiliary software. As of January 2025, this software can be used to plan chemical reactions (through ChemHacktica) and create MicroLab recipe files (through the recipe press). The long-term goals include better integration between these applications and an improved user experience for cataloging research, reaction pathways, and MicroLab recipes.
- TODO: more details here