General design procedure for free and open-source hardware for scientific equipment

Publishing date: 2017-12-30

Published on: Designs

summary: An open source toolkit for science is useful, but an open source toolkit that follows formal design principles might be even more so - improving interoperability, reproducibility and quality of designs. Oberloier and Pearce describe a five step procedure which encompasses six design principles for the development of free and open-source hardware for scientific applications. These include good quality documentation and validation data, parametric designs that allow generalisable solutions to problems encountered in the lab and the advice to “share aggressively”! This useful framework is illustrated by a neat project to design a slide dryer - a staple piece of kit for imaging labs to speed up processing of microscopy samples.

authors: Shane Oberloier, Joshua M. Pearce

link to paper: http://www.mdpi.com/2411-9660/2/1/2/htm

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