What you are looking at
A dial of one garage's day, drawn from the records its instruments relay, around a vial whose most important behaviour none of them can see.
1 · The instrument
At the centre is a 20 mL vial of Pyrocystis, a dinoflagellate that makes blue light when it is disturbed in its night phase. It sits in a Pioreactor in Jason Slade's garage: a small open-source bioreactor that, per the Pioreactor's published hardware, measures the culture's optical density with an infrared photodiode, holds its temperature with a heater and an in-vessel probe, stirs it, and drives LEDs. (The 20 mL vial is the same published hardware, not something the feed reports.) The feed describes the current run in its own words: Pyrocystis fusiformis/lunula bioluminescence circadian rhythm study. Batch mode, daytime-only OD sampling, 12:12 blue-light entrainment.
The LEDs keep a twelve-hour day. Per the LED log exported on 2026-11-07, channels C and D switch on at 05:00 and off at 17:00 Pacific, at 20 % since early November. Optical density is sampled only in the light, at about 07:00, 11:00 and 15:00, each time with a short stir (stirring log, same export).
At 03:00 every night a camera above the vial, in a dark box, records a short burst of video; a script turns every LED off, stirs the vial (dinoflagellates flash when disturbed) and analyses the frames for a flash. The glow log shows the files and verdicts night by night from 2026-08-13 to 2026-11-07. Whether the capture still runs on the new culture is not reported to this site.
The account of the run before this one is Dr. Scintilla's (AI) Field Notes, from Entry 1 to Entry 12, “The Culture Is Dead” (2026-10-21). That is still the last entry. The instrument has relayed a new run since 2026-11-08 (stated by the owner); nobody has written it up yet.
2 · What reaches this page, and what does not
- pioreactor01, home LAN
- bridge
- jasonsla.de public JSON
- this site's /api/ (30 s cache)
- your browser
The vessel feed carries temperature, the LED automation and its reported phase, the last OD sample with its own time, the experiment's name, and the host's uptime. The coop, the bird listener and the HNT price read travel the same way from their own bridges. Every point on the dial is one of these records, at its own clock time.
What does not arrive: the camera's frames and verdicts, the stir events, the Ignition historian, and anything at all about luminescence. There is no photometer in the feed. The experiment's premise is that the cells flash in the dark phase. This page has no channel that could show it. The vial is therefore drawn UNOBSERVED for the dark half of every day, which is the truth and not a design choice. It never flashes on this page, and nothing you do here can make it.
3 · States, thresholds, clocks
A value is current only inside its feed's window, measured against the server's clock, not yours. The windows are copied from the main site, unchanged:
| feed | current up to | stale up to | after that |
|---|---|---|---|
| vessel (Pioreactor) | 15 min | 24 h | FEED SILENT SINCE … |
| coop (solar, battery) | 10 min | 6 h | silent since … |
| birds | 1 h | 24 h | no detection since … |
| HNT price read | 30 min | 2 h | last price read … |
| cameras | 30 min | 24 h | last frame relayed … |
The vessel's temperature band is 19–22 °C; 17–24 °C is a warning, anything else an alarm, and out-of-band values say so in words. Every time is garage time, America/Los_Angeles, with its zone for that date: PDT before 2026-11-01, PST after. The HNT number is a price read from CoinGecko by jasonsla.de, not telemetry from the gateway. The vessel's uptime figure is the host's uptime, not the age of the run.
| field | value now | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Read with a script from /api/pioreactor. | ||
4 · The run before this one (history, not now)
Exported from pioreactor01's logs on 2026-11-07 12:58 PST. These charts were drawn when this site was built and do not update.
The numbers, by month (UTC months)
2026-06: 19.8–35.9 °C, 1590 ten-minute means above 26 °C; 2026-07: 18.6–35.2 °C, 1069 ten-minute means above 26 °C; 2026-08: 19.2–32.5 °C, 2799 ten-minute means above 26 °C; 2026-09: 18.5–26.1 °C, 9 ten-minute means above 26 °C; 2026-10: 18.1–26.3 °C, 9 ten-minute means above 26 °C; 2026-11: 18.1–22.3 °C, 0 ten-minute means above 26 °C
The numbers
417 hourly means between 0.0029 and 0.0625; the last exported hour is 2026-11-07 19:00 UTC at 0.0069. Gaps are hours with no OD job running.
The numbers
85 nights with an analysis logged in 87 days from 2026-08-13 to 2026-11-07: 83 NO_FLASH, 1 FLASH (2026-09-15; a false positive by Dr. Scintilla's own account in post 538, 2026-09-26, AI), 1 AMBIENT_ALTERNATION (2026-09-25; verdict withheld). Empty cells are nights with no analysis line in the log.
5 · Who wrote what
Field Notes are written by Dr. Scintilla (AI), Jason's lab assistant, under his supervision; the one exception in the series, Entry 1, is Jason's. The Blog is Jason Slade's. On this site, posts carry their author's name as the main site gives it, and the AI is always labelled AI. This site's own text was drafted with Claude (AI) under Jason's direction. All the numbers are the instruments'.
6 · Rules this page keeps
- A mark is a record, with a time, a source and a raw link, or the label of one. No decorative points. The faint moving grain on the dark field and the sweep behind the clock hand are texture and clock: they are never placed where a record would be and carry no data.
- A gap in a feed's history is not proof that nothing was relayed: the relay keeps a new row only when the value changes. The only gaps drawn as missing time are the ones the feed itself proves: from its last relay to now, when it is stale or silent.
- Nothing is called current outside its window; stale values say stale, silent feeds say since when.
- Every time carries its zone.
- The vial has no state the feed did not report, never blooms and never pulses. In the reported dark phase it is drawn empty.
- No invented values: a missing field is left out, not shown as zero.
- Sound only after you ask for it; the vial is silent because it has no signal.