Teabiscuits

Teabiscuits (written Teabiscuits™ in company materials) is the name of the custom electronics platform of the demonpore 64, the nanopore reader that demonpore, inc. built in the shape of a 1980s game console. The company's records give its specification as picoampere to nanoampere currents at a bandwidth of 125 kHz, with a pore cartridge that can be swapped in under 20 seconds.^[1] An outside electronics designer produced the core of the electronics in 2020 and 2021.^[2] A board with the same name was built in early 2024, and the amplifier chip that it tested appears in the company's open design of 2026.^[1][3]

The December 2022 overview of the company says that the console was designed "from the inside out, starting with the most technically demanding part", a custom patch-clamp amplifier, which measures the current through a pore at a voltage that the user sets. Around the amplifier sat an analog-to-digital converter, a digital-to-analog converter and a microcontroller. The console took its power over USB and talked to the company's server over Ethernet.^[4] The amplifier is the first link of what electronics engineers call an analog front end. In a nanopore instrument that link is usually a transimpedance amplifier, which turns the pore's current into a voltage that is filtered and handed to the converter.

A bandwidth of 125 kHz means that a step in the current can rise in about 2.8 microseconds, if the front end behaves as a single-pole low-pass filter, for which the rise time from 10 to 90 percent is 0.35 divided by the bandwidth.^[a] A converter has to sample at more than twice the bandwidth to keep what the amplifier passes, so a front end of this bandwidth needs more than 250,000 samples per second. Noise grows with bandwidth, which is why a wider front end sees faster events and a noisier trace; see Nanopore noise and Bandwidth (signal processing).

The core electronics were designed in 2020 and 2021 by an outside electronics designer, and another contributor led the enclosure and the flow cells.^[2] The console never went on sale. Of it the founder wrote in 2026 that the company "should have shipped in a form very close to the one seen, very early on. But we didn't."^[4]

The name survived the console. Company records show a board called Teabiscuits Bias r2, built on a protoboard called Colorful Flavor in early 2024, to try the LMP7721, a precision amplifier with an input bias current of 3 femtoamperes typically and 20 femtoamperes at most.^[1][5] The same chip is the first stage of the older handheld MR1 Molecular Streaming Device and of the open MR1 Nanopore Reader.^[1][3]

Bandwidth, in the second row, and sampling rate, in the others, are different quantities.^[1][3]

• Pre-Wright Brothers Flights
• Picoampere