Introduction to Open-Source Hardware for Science - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 1

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Open-Source
Hardware for Science
Abstract
As the successful free and open-source process is being applied to hardware, an opportunity has arisen
to radically reduce the cost of experimental research in the sciences. This topic is relevant to every sci-
entist and engineer who does experimental research and employees of scientific funding agencies. A re-
volution is occurring where formally highly specialized, high-cost scientific equipment can be fabricated
using digital designs at factor of 10-100 cost reductions. This makes science much more accessible to the
general population, DIY and amateur scientists, grade school science labs, etc. It also reduces costs for
our most advanced research institutes. This chapter defines the basic terms of open-source software and
discusses the rise of the open-source hardware revolution and how it impacts science.
Keywords
Free and open-source hardware (FOSH); Free and open-source software (FOSS); Free libre open
source software (FLOSS); Open-source hardware (OSH); Open-source
1.1 Introduction
By any standard, the process of development and licensing for free and open-source software,
which is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 , has been a success. Because of this success, the
method is now being applied to hardware. Thus, an opportunity has arisen to radically reduce
the cost of experimental research in the sciences [ 1 ] . This opportunity has the potential to
reduce your research costs and make your laboratory more productive—while at the same time
vastly expanding the scientiic user base. Speciically, this topic focuses on the combination of
open-source microcontrollers covered in Chapter 4 and open-source 3-D printing reviewed in
Chapter 5 . These two tools running on free open-source software enable the development of
powerful research tools at unprecedented low costs. Chapter 6 provides several detailed ex-
amples of these tools for a wide range of science and engineering disciplines. Then, in Chapter
7 , these developments and their likely trajectories in the future are explored and illustrated with
numerous examples to lay out a path of mutually reinforcing and accelerating free and open-
source scientific hardware development for the benefit of science.
1.2 What is Open Source?
The term “open source” emerged during a strategy session between several hackers 1 of the early
open software movement [ 2 ]. Free and open-source software (F/OSS, FOSS) or free/libre/open-