Introduction to Open-Source Hardware for Science - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 5

FIGURE 1.1 Wikipedia infographic by Statista.
This superior software development method has even developed something of an actual
“movement”. The FOSS movement emerged as a fundamentally new, decentralized, particip-
atory and transparent system to develop software in contrast to the closed box, top-down and
secretive standard commercial approach [ 4 , 10 - 12 ] . FOSS provides (1) an alternative to expens-
ive and proprietary systems, (2) a reduction in research and development costs, (3) a viable
alternative to the linear hierarchical structure used to design any type of technology-based
products and (4) the efficiency of collaboration, demand-driven innovation and the power of
the Internet to provide for a global collective good. Due to this tremendous success of FOSS
development, the concept has spread to areas such as education [ 13 , 14 ] , appropriate techno-
logy for sustainable development (called open-source appropriate technology) [ 15 - 18 ] , science
[ 19 ] , nanotechnology [ 20 - 22 ] and medicine [ 23 , 24 ] . Both academic and nonacademic scientists
are accustomed to this line of thinking as both historical knowledge sharing and the Internet
enabled new era of networked science have demonstrated the enormous power of working to-
gether [ 25 - 27 ] .
1.3 Free and Open-Source Hardware
These open and collaborative principles of licensing FOSS are easily transferred to scientific
hardware designs [ 1 ] . Thus, free and open-source hardware ( FOSH ) is a hardware whose design
is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the
design or hardware based on that design. The most successful enabling open-source hard-
ware project is the Arduino electronic prototyping platform 4 , which we will investigate in de-
tail in Chapter 4 . The $20-60 Arduino is a powerful, yet easy-to-learn microcontroller that can
be used to run a burgeoning list of scientific apparatuses directly including the already de-
veloped Polar Bear (environmental chamber—detailed in Chapter 4 ) , Arduino Geiger (radi-
ation detector) 5 , pHduino (pH meter) 6 , Xoscillo (Oscilloscope) 7 , and OpenPCR (DNA analys-
is) 8 . However, one of the Arduino's most impressive technological evolution-enabling applic-
ations is with 3-D printing.
Using an Arduino as the brain, 3-D printers capable of additive manufacturing or additive
layer manufacturing from a number of materials including polymers, ceramics and metals
have been developed. The most popular of these 3-D printers is the RepRap, named because
it is a self-replicating rapid prototyping machine. 9 Currently, the RepRap ( Figure 1.2 ) , which
uses fused-filament fabrication of complex 3-D objects, can fabricate approximately 50% of its
own parts and can be made for under $1000 [ 28 ]. The version we will explore in Chapter 5 can
be built for about $500 and assembled in a weekend. This ability to inexpensively and freely
self-replicate has resulted in an explosion of both RepRap users and design improvements
[ 28 ] . RepRaps are used to print many kinds of objects from toys to household items, but one
application where their transformative power is most promising is in significantly reducing
experimental research costs. As many scientists with access to RepRaps have found, it is less
expensive to design and print research tools, and a number of simple designs have begun to
lourish in Thingivers e 10 , which is a free and open repository for digital designs for real phys-
ical objects. These include single-component prints such as parametric cuvete/vial racks as
shown in Figure 1.3 . Three-dimensional printers have also been used to print an entirely new
class of reactionware for customizing chemical reactions [ 29 ] .