Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 187

to nanofabrication, nanoimprinting, and nanoscale deposition techniques that open up further
applications. With strong cases being made for more open-source approaches in nanotechno-
logy [ 13 , 14 ], the codevelopment of these concepts could provide enormously powerful tools.
For example, a microscale 3-D printer could print the integrated circuit used in open-source
optics or a nanoscale 3-D printer can print the gratings used for light diffraction. In addition,
3-D printers and nanotechnology provide the opportunity to fabricate digital designs of chip-
like optical systems further depressing costs of experimental equipment and opening the pos-
sibility of making them as ubiquitous as cell-phone cameras.
The methodology described here can also be used to make more advanced optical devices
such as spectrometers (which we will look at in the last section of this chapter), monochro-
mators and ellipsometers and of course other areas of physics. Not only optical apparatuses
can be built in this way; mass spectrometers, chromatography and even X-ray diffraction sys-
tems and other equipment are also theoretically printable to a large extent using next-gener-
ation open-source 3-D printers. On the other hand, as the 3-D printer itself is reduced in size,
it is also possible to have built-in 3-D printers inside the large machines, serving as an in-situ
assistant for components replacement, circuit reparation and in-situ design and in-situ fabric-
ation. Symes et al. have already reported the application of 3-D printer as reactionware for
chemical synthesis and analysis [ 15 ] . This enabled reactions to be initiated by printing the re-
agents directly into a 3-D reactionware matrix and to be monitored in situ. The construction
of a relatively cheap, automated and reconfigurable chemical platform makes the techniques
from chemical engineering accessible to traditional synthetic laboratories [ 15 ].
A large number of open-source software programs and open-source databases have been
built in recent years that benefit scientists [ 16 - 26 ] . As OSH becomes more mainstream and
open-source data sharing allows everyone everywhere at any time to design, build, share
and comment on OSH, the utility of the approach will create a virtuous cycle. As people
design, build, share and comment, they contribute value to the open-source communities,
which everyone again can benefit from and thus encourage more participation. As this section
has demonstrated, this has already started in the field of optics, can spread throughout the rest
of physics and the other sciences and is applicable to most fields.

6.2.4 Section summary
This section introduced a library of open-source 3-D printable optical components to provide
an extremely flexible, customizable, low-cost, start of a public-domain library for developing
both physics research and teaching optics hardware. Using this open-source optics method
can reduce costs of many optical components by 97% or more. It is clear that this method of
scientific hardware development enables a much broader audience to participate in optical ex-
perimentation as both teaching and research platforms than previous proprietary methods.

6.3 Engineering: Open-Source Laser Welder,

Radiation Detection, and Oscilloscopes
6.3.1 Open-source laser welder
One of the most useful facets of open-source equipment is the ability to build on one anothers'
work. This section describes the development of an open-source automated polymer welding
system for testing heat exchanger designs, which was built on the open-design computer nu-
merical control (CNC) laser community.