Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Many research groups are also sharing the designs for their hardware. As additional re-
search groups begin to freely share the designs of their own laboratory hardware, not only
can everyone in the greater scientific community enjoy those same discounts on equip-
ment, but following the FOSS approach, the equipment will also continue to evolve to be-
come even better in the open source scientific design community. In addition, research
costs will be decreased even when scientists choose a commercial version of a tool be-
cause of the price pressure from the open source community. The academic world is on
the verge of a new era where low-cost scientific equipment puts increasingly sophisticated
tools into the hands of not just academics at the top universities, but also their peers at
every university and even the public (Pearce, 2012, 2014).
Sharing of the designs can also be expanded to encompass methods, protocols, and ex-
perimental designs. The first advantage to doing so is intrinsic. When it is stressed to stu-
dents that these experimental designs will be web searchable for all of time, graduate stu-
dents tend to be more careful about their experimental designs because they are being
shared as a quasi-publication. More importantly, by sharing, professors can gain external
support. On a routine basis, academics, industry members, and government scientists and
engineers from all over the world will be able to improve shared equipment and experi-
mental designs. For example, in our work, outsiders have recommended new software or
ways to use existing software; improved programs, device drivers, and firmware to meet
our needs; and on the hardware side provided component 3D designs, improved electron-
ics, improved mechanical designs, or advice on assembly of experimental setups. In some
cases, external supporters helped us correct errors and oversights in our write-ups before
we started non-optimized experiments, which saved us enormous quantities of resources
(time and money) by avoiding the need to repeat poorly optimized experiments. These be-
nefits all came from massive peer review and our willingness to actively share. For ex-
ample, many of our examples of using open source hardware and software have been
viewed more than 10,000 times. Following on Eric Raymond's idea, this is a lot of eye-
balls looking for potential mistakes and better ways of running experiments (Raymond,
1999).
Academics can also directly benefit by building on the open source hardware that has
already been created. For example, for work related to the lowest-cost method of using
solar energy to provide clean and safe drinking water in the developing world (Denken-
berger and Pearce, 2006), my group needed a highly effective, extremely low-cost heat
exchanger. We developed one using a thin, polymer-based expanded microchannel design
(Denkenberger et al., 2012), but making the prototypes commercially would have been
prohibitively expensive. Instead, we developed a polymer-laser welding system to make
trols (Pearce, 2014). Our experience was that the time for development was a tiny fraction
