Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
designs for free to make your laboratory operate beter for less money, but we expect in re-
turn that you feed your improvements back into the open-source ecosystem. If you make im-
provements, share your source files and instructions with everyone else. Depending on your
improvement, it may be appropriate to share it with:
The Arduino.cc community.
The code at sourceforge.net/projects/bearproject/.
The
Appropedia
project
page:
4.6 Concluding Thoughts and Additional Reading
In this chapter, we have covered the basics of open-source microcontroller use for scientific
equipment and detailed an example where the open-source paradigm creates a research-grade
tool for less than 1/16th of the cost of commercial equipment. As we will see in
Chapters 5
and
hardware and is customized to your labs use. Even if your research never is in the need of an
environmental chamber, walking through the exercise above should have prepared you to use
Arduinos or similar open-source microcontrollers to design, use and troubleshoot automated
scientific tools of your own if you know C++. If you would like to learn more about Ardu-
ino microcontrollers and really pick up the basics from the first step, in addition to the project
website, some of these texts may be useful to you:
Banzi, M. (2011).
Geting Started with Arduino. 2nd Edition.
Make. (This is an excellent guide
to provide to graduate students to take them from no experience to being useful for work-
ing with Arduinos to make scientific equipment).
Margolis, M. (2011).
Arduino Cookbook.
O'Reilly Media, Incorporated. (This provides many
example projects, writen more for the Maker community that may be of use on some sci-
entific projects).
Monk, S. (2012).
Programming Arduino: Geting Started with Sketches
McGraw-Hill. (This is a
slightly more advanced text on programming for more complicated projects.)
References
1. Arduino.
Pin map of the Arduino Mega 2560
. Available from
htp://arduino.cc/en/uploads/
2. HH10D Datasheet. 2013; In:
htp://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/Temperature/
3. Philips Semiconductors.
Bi-directional level shifter for I²C-bus and other systems
. August,
2007; In:
htp://ics.nxp.com/support/documents/interface/pdf/an97055.pdf
;
August, 2007.
4. Pearce JM. Building research equipment with free, open-source hardware.
Science
.
2012;337(6100):1303-1304.
1
T
1The complete plans for the Arduino modules are published under a Creative Commons license (as discussed in detail
in
Chapter 3
). This means you can make your own or if you are an experienced circuit designer, you can develop your
own version of the module, extending it and improving it. At the same time if you want to save money from buying
a commercially available Arduino, you can make yourself a breadboard version. In the very near future as will be
discussed in
Chapter 5
on 3-D printing and in
Chapter 7
, you may be able to print Arduinos in your lab as needed.
2
T
2The reader should keep in mind that the Arduino is a prototyping platform first and foremost. Thus, it would always
be less expensive to design a hardware solution directly around the Amtel chip and, for example, only have the num-
ber of inputs and outputs necessary for the project. An example of this is shown in
Chapter 5
where we use a Arduino-
compatible, simpler and less expensive board to run an open-source 3-D printer. For the most part though when
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