Setup, equipment, and procedure in enough detail to run the same thing and get a comparable number. Everything here uses hardware available for under a few hundred dollars.
Protocols are versioned. When one is replaced, the earlier version stays on this page with the date it stopped being current and the reason. A protocol that produced a result later retired is still worth reading, because the failure is usually in the procedure rather than the analysis.
In use as of the date above. Paper data (Dec 2025–Apr 2026) used this stack.
Long-duration differential recording from colonised substrate blocks under constant darkness. Covers electrode preparation and placement, differential pair configuration (d01, d23), sample rate and gain, DHT22 environmental logging alongside the electrical channels, and gap-handling rules for excluding periods from analysis.
ESP32 · ADS1115 16-bit ADC · stainless needles · DHT22
Building an impedance-matched saline phantom and recording it under the same settings as a colonised block. Without this, a quiet recording cannot be distinguished from a quiet amplifier, and no claim about a small effect is interpretable.
Run before any new rig is used for data and repeated whenever the acquisition chain changes.
Saline · matched electrode geometry · same gain and rate as the experiment
Recording spectra before and after each change to the acquisition chain, in a fixed order: radio emissions disabled on the microcontroller, decoupling at the converter supply pins, single-point ground between the digital and analogue sides, then optional filtering on the analogue rail.
The order matters because the largest contributor is free to remove and the later changes are only measurable once it is gone. Changes that made no difference are recorded too.
Same block, same placement, spectra at each step
No longer in use. Kept because the record of what was run when is part of what makes an earlier result readable.
Saline addition to a colonised block with continuous recording before and after. Written for passive baseline recording and characterisation of the baseline under osmotic change.
Earlier versions of the current recording protocol, using a shared ground arrangement that later contributed noise traced to the supply arrangement.
Different results are welcome; see About.