As a group we are committed to open science practices, and making sure our results are freely available to everyone.
That means all our publications are published as Gold Open Access. We are furthermore also committed to open source hardware, which is why we initiated the ‘Open Science Lab’ project!
Open Science Lab
As experimental scientists, a lot of our time is devoted to designing, testing and constructing new lab equipment. Especially the advancement of new manufacturing techniques (in particular 3D printing), along with easy to use and affordable microcontrollers (Raspberry Pi, Arduino,…) has made it much easier to make your own specialised lab equipment. In many cases this can be much cheaper then buying commercially available equipment, and it can be tailored to your needs.
We feel that many labs are already using this, but frequently we all seem to be solving the same problems again. Others might feel the entry barriers are too high. Within the ‘Open Science Lab’ project we want to share our designs for commonly-used laboratory equipment we have designed, so others may use it – and improve it- in an open source fashion.
The designs and manufacturing instructions for all our ‘Open Science Lab’ hardware are freely available on our GitHub under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Below is a quick overview of the hardware we have made available so far.
Optics Parts
Motorized Kinematic Mirror Mount
All the designs and parts needed to convert a conventional kinematic (tip/tilt) mirror mount into a fully motorized and computer controllable mount. This uses widely available small stepper motors (usually < $3) and 3D printed parts. These can be controlled via an arduino microcontroller, as shared below.
Full design available here!
Motorized Rotation Mount
All the designs and parts needed to convert a conventional rotation mount into a fully motorized and computer controllable mount. This uses a widely available small stepper motor (usually < $3) and 3D printed parts. These can be controlled via an arduino microcontroller, as shared below.
Controllers
Arduino Controller for 28BYJ-48 motors
Instructions and software needed to control 28BYJ-48 stepper motors with an arduino MEGA with sensor shield. These are the stepper motors used in our motorized kinematic and rotation mounts.
The steppers can be controller using simple terminal commands. We also provide a LabView UI (including compiled executable) to control two motors, for example to control the tip/tilt of a kinematic mirror mount.
Full design available here!