The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 33

14 T 14Today selfish academics can only reply to questions at conferences “I can't answer that, it is proprietary” a few times
before being left behind to perish in the libraries of ignored literature.
15 T The maker movement is a relatively new, contemporary subculture, representing a technology-based extension of
the more old-school DIY culture. Think mash up of Martha Stewart and Tony Stark (Iron Man). These modern day cy-
berpunks enjoy engineering-oriented pursuits for fun such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of CNC
(computer numerical control) tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and
traditional arts and crafts. The maker subculture stresses new and unique applications of technologies, and encour-
ages invention prototyping, and of course sharing and building on one another's work. There is a strong focus on us-
ing and learning practical skills and applying them creatively. For more information about the Maker movement, read
Make Magazine ( htp://makezine.com/ ) or consider visiting a local Hacker or Maker Space, which are community-op-
erated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects ( http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/ ). Makers are
not just playing around, although both the fictional literature (see Makers by Cory Doctorow for an excellent intro-
duction to the subculture htp://craphound.com/makers/ ) and reading their blogs makes it look like fun. It has already
been predicted to foster the next great industrial revolution [ 57 ] .
16 S ee htp://diydrones.com/ . This community created the Arduino-based ArduPilot, the world's first universal auto-
pilot, which can be applied to planes, multicopters of all sorts and ground rovers. We will cover much more details
about the open-source Arduino electronic prototyping platform in Chapter 4 . The ArduPilot Mega 2 autopilot hard-
ware runs a variety of powerful free UAV software systems, including (1) ArduPlane, a pro-level UAV system for
planes of all types and (2) ArduCopter, a fully autonomous multicopter and helicopter UAV system. The potential
scientific applications of these low-cost systems have only begun to be explored.