Joystick for science
The joystick for science is a game controller that Molecular Reality Corporation adapted to run laboratory equipment. It plugged into the demonpore 64, the company's 2020 to 2021 nanopore reader in the form of a video game console, through what the company's 2022 overview calls "a Db9 plug for a custom joystick".[1] A caption on the company's website says that "we used this to control the syringe pump and electronics using Maxine's Quest in the early version of the demonpore 64", and gives its present status: "sitting on Kemmishtree's desk."[2]
The joystick is black, with a single stick and a red button in the style of home consoles of the late 1970s. A sticker of Maxine, the company's red cartoon demon, is fixed to its base, and a red DNA helix rings the stick where it meets the base.[2]
Rationale
The overview expected the joystick to look odd, and argued for it from experience:
As for the custom joystick, it may look silly at first, but if you've ever spent hours and hours doing hands-on experiments with solid state nanopores and the instruments that test them, staring at control software and fiddling with parameters like voltage and sampling rate, you'll immediately realize the value of a joystick.
Kemmishtree, 2022 overview
It added that joysticks are "common in microscopy for moving stages" and are "a fun and easy way to control nanopore instrumentation".[1] Motorized microscope stages and micromanipulators are often driven this way, so that a hand can move a sample or a pipette while the eyes stay on the image. In company records the joystick's job is given as control of the console's syringe pump, which pushed and withdrew liquid through the flow cell.[2]
The connector
The "Db9 plug" is a nine-pin D-subminiature connector, more strictly called a DE-9. The joystick that came with the Atari 2600 home console in 1977 used one, and so many later machines copied it that the arrangement became known as the Atari joystick port. A joystick of that kind is digital. It closes one switch for each of four directions and one for the button, so it tells a machine which way to go but not how far; the software decides how fast an input becomes motion.
Steering molecules
The company's plans give a joystick more to steer than a pump. Its core idea, sliding occlusion, makes a pore by sliding one membrane across another, so that moving a part moves the size of the hole. Its field guide describes the goal as "a pore you can widen to admit a molecule, then narrow to hold it, then release, a valve with molecular fingers".[3] The 2022 console also had switches for "a rapid oscillating pattern to the syringe pump", which could push a particle back and forth through the pore, the technique the company calls ping-pong sensing.[1] In a game, the same inputs would come from a player. The overview's argument for that, that experiments could be played and coordinated as games, is described in experigaming.[1]
The first game the company built on live pore signals took its name from a 1980s arcade game, Spy Hunter; see Spyke Hunter.[4]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.