Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 244

FIGURE 6.88 The Science Tricorder Mark 2 prototype sensor board.

The open-source spectrometers significantly reduce the costs associated with many exper-
iments that need them, while also enabling the production of highly customizable designs
for specialized experiments. These reductions in costs and increases in flexibility are likely
to boost technical development in any field that utilize spectrometers. At the same time that
it assists the research community, it can also radically reduce the cost of education, amateur
and DIY science [ 2 ] . This is thus likely to encourage more DIY scientists and young people to
enter STEM fields [ 55 , 56 ] . These developments provide interesting possibilities in the future,
where it is now quite possible to consider the general public performing their own real-time
chemical analyses with their cell phones. Similar to the crowd-sourced data gathering with
the Arduino-based Geiger counters, the public could provide highly reliable geographically
tagged data on air, water and food quality, etc.

6.6.2 3-D printable chemical equipment
In the last section, we looked at various test tube racks and stands, which would be useful
to chemists in addition to biologists, but there are also many other both simple and more
advanced (and costly) 3-D printable components for chemistry laboratories. For example,
consider the Buckner funnel and open-source printable example, 104 of which is shown in

MeshLab 105 (open-source 3-D mesh processing software) Figure 6.89 .