Abstract
The introduction of affordable, consumer-oriented 3-D printers is a milestone in the current “maker movement,” which has been heralded as the next industrial revolution. Combined with free and open sharing of detailed design blueprints and accessible development tools, rapid prototypes of complex products can now be assembled in one’s own garage—a game-changer reminiscent of the early days of personal computing. At the same time, 3-D printing has also allowed the scientific and engineering community to build the “little things” that help a lab get up and running much faster and easier than ever before.
Highlights
Inexpensive and consumer-oriented microcontroller boards built around simple processors. These boards offer a variety of interfaces, μstimers, and multiple general-purpose input-output (GPIO) pins suitable for running simple, time-precise programs to control custom-built electronics
Most makers share their designs under an open source license together with detailed assembly instructions in online repositories [20,21,22] such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 3-D print exchange [23] or in peer-reviewed journals [10,17,24,25,26,27,28,29]
On the whole, Open Labware possibilities remain poorly established in this context, as attested in a survey taken by 89 biomedical researchers from 12 sub-Saharan African countries in August 2014 (Fig. 3)
Summary
It comes as no surprise that these technologies are routinely used by research scientists and, especially, educators aiming to customize existing lab equipment or even build sophisticated lab equipment from scratch for a mere fraction of what commercial alternatives cost [6]. Designs for such “Open Labware” include simple mechanical adaptors [7], PLOS Biology | DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002086. March 20, 2015 output; IT, information technology; LED, Light Emitting Diode; NIH, National Institutes of Health; PCB, Printed Circuit Board; PLA, Polylactic acid; TReND, Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development (in Africa); UV, Ultraviolet.
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