Recent content on Towards open and FAIR hardware

Julien Colomb

Next week, starting 31.05.2025, we will be one week in Hannover for the Hannover Messe. The Messe is quite famous (the. “world leading industryshow”) in the world of the manufacturing industry.

OpenMake at the Hannover Messe 2025

Open.Make Team

Interview: VentMon Robert Read lead the development of a ventilator test device during the Covid19 pandemic, it became the Ventmon.

 By the Open make team and Robert Read.

Interview: VentMon

Let’s work together !   The Open.Make project is collaborating with different projects and communities in order to achieve its goal. If you think you have similar or complementary objectives, do not hesitate to contact us and let’s start collaborating.

Related work

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Hardware in research   My name is Mik Schutte. During my master thesis (2022), I was tasked with the rebuilding of a setup: the microstimulation setup. I got acquainted with the hardware surrounding experimental research. All hardware components together make the setup which, if functioning correctly allows for an experimental protocol to be carried out.

Three months in Delft, two open hardware projects

Original post (2021-09-27) has been updated (2023-12-14).

The problem(s) Have you ever tried to follow instructions on how to assemble something and get stuck, either due to a lack of clarity or missing information? This can be annoying enough when you are trying to setup a new piece of furniture, but when your goal is to replicate someone’s research

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, these annoyances create an additional burden.

Scope of the Open.Make project.

Interview: Smart citizen kit   Guillem Camprodon is the Executive Director of Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC, he was mostly involved in the development of the Smart Citizen Kit, which is the central concept around having a minimum set of tools to measure the environment, leading to the development of the smart citizen concept.

Interview: Smart-citizen-kit

Grenoble: a different way of life ?   In France and particularly in Grenoble, one can find a lot of active associations that usually do not have a strong online presence, but are very active locally. These are sport, culture or teaching-directed associations. A good example is the “ptit velo dans la tête” organisation.

Fellowship in Grenoble: France, OSH and low-tech

This post is in German, an English summary and alt text to images will be added in the coming weeks. Aknowledgement: I want to thank my son Jeff (10) for corrections of my text. Hallo liebe Besucher*innen, auf diesen Website erklären wir, worum dieses Projekt OpenMake sich handelt und warum wir es betreiben. Auf den homepage können Sie sehen, dass Wir sind aus verschiedenen Unis in Berlin.

LNDW2024: BUA mobile lab presentation

Interview: Plastic scanner Jerry de Vos developed the plastic scanner during his master thesis, it will be a device that can identify the most common types of plastic, in order to make plastic recycling simpler, more accessible, and more viable!

 by the Open make team, and Jerry de Vos.

Interview: Plastic scanner

Interview: Gorgas Tracker Pierre Padilla Huamantinco is a PhD student at Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering, he led the development of the Gorgas Tracker, a device that was used to track the position of people and investigate the role of human population movement in malaria epidemiology in rural villages in the Peruvian Amazon river networks.

 by the Open make team, Pierre Padilla Huamantinco.

Interview: Gorgas Tracker

28 June 2023

We will run a workshop at the coming Open Science Conference, which will be held online: register to the conference, mark your calendar and join us! Conference: 2023-06-27 to 2023-06-29 Workshop: 2023-06-28 14:30 (to 16:30) Creating a research hardware publication ecosystem: Technical and cultural roadmap In this workshop, we will present the requirements of researchers/makers/engineers that we collected from

Workshop at the open science conference

Interview: GaudiLabs Urs Gaudenz has been part of hackteria and similar open source hardware communities for a long time. Nine years ago, he started GaudiLabs, a “desktop manufacturing” company that is selling open source hardware produced in small scale. One of these products is the Pocket-PCR machine.

 by the Open make team, Urs Gaudenz.

Interview: Guaudilabs, the Pocket-PCR

Interview: Farmbot

 by the Open make team and Rory Aronson.

Interview: Farmbot

20022-05-13 “PI meeting”   We had our first progress report with the lab heads Profs. Larkum, Jochem, and Lindgraf. We used a two hours window to present the new team members, as well as our progresses, successes and failures. We are now sharing these with all of you. We hope you will enjoy this summary of our presentations and discussions.

Work in progress - No1

This page is empty for now, please contact us with your questions.

Here, Julien Colomb presents in a very short post the idea of having and attribution reference and a provenance reference for an hardware/software/dataset object. We present 2 objectives of citing data, one workaround for having it all, what is would mean for hardware paper and end with a question about the validity of this ideas. He is hoping that it may open a discussion on this topic.

Two citations with one doi ?

On September 1st the Berlin university alliance project Open.make: toward open and FAIR hardware has officially started. Three labs that work together for the first time will collaborate and design a social and technical infrastructure, in order to foster open and FAIR hardware publication and recognition. In this post, we will describe how the idea was developed over a short period of time following the publication of a BUA call.

Genesis of the open.make project.

In Open.Make we are looking for three motivated student assistants to support our research team and enrich it with your own unique and complementary skillset. Any student of a Berlin university can apply to any of the three positions (salary 12,68 € brutto according to TV Stud III). The majority of the work needs to be done on site. Yet, some of the work can also be carried out remotely.

Student assistant position available

Interview: Craniobot

 by the Open make team, Suhasa Kodandaramaiah.

Interview: craniobot

This blog post will present our progresses in our work on defining FAIR for research hardware. It has been updated, you can see its history on github. Summary   After a gosh forum entry and initial meetings, we have created a RDA group for FAIR hardware: httpS://rd-alliance.org/groups/fair-principles-research-hardware. The group has agreed on a charter that has been endorsed by the RDA.

defining FAIR for research hardware

Dear Reader,  We presented the BUA Mobile Lab project at the Long Night of Science 2024 in Berlin. During this annual event, universities and research institutions showcase scientific demonstrations, lectures, and interactive activities, making science accessible and engaging for all ages.

BUA Mobile Lab at Long Night of Science 2024

Interview: audiomoth Alex Rogers is a Professor of Computer Science who lead the team that developed the audiomoth, a low-price passve sound recorder used for biodiversity monitoring in the wild.

 by the Open make team, Alex Rogers.

Interview summary: audiomoth

On October 7th 2021, the Open.Make project kickoff meeting took place at the Charité campus in Mitte. The three research partners/labs, the project officer from the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) and three invited external partners presented and discussed their respective works. It was a successful meeting as it offered a broad overview of the benefits of open hardware in academia and beyond.

Open.Make kickoff meeting.

Interview: OpenFlexure microsocpe Julian Stirling has been a core developer of the OpenFlexure project, which makes high precision mechanical positioning available to anyone with a 3D printer - for use in microscopes, micromanipulators, and more.

 by the Open make team and Julian Stirling.

Interview: OpenFlexure microscope

OpenMake II   It is a pleasure to announce that the Open.Make project has been funded for another 2.5 years. The work will become more practical and local. We are one of three projects that received a second round of funding by the BUA. While you can download the full application on zenodo: doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8220972, here is a very short summary of our plans.

OpenMake II application: published and funded

Interview: M19 Oxygen Concentrator Vaibhav Chhabra organised the development of an oxygen concentrator during the Covid19 pandemic. The present version is called M19 Oxygen Concentrator.

 by the Open make team, Vaibhav Chhabra.

M19 Oxygen Concentrator

Interview: White rabbit Javier Serrano has been leading the development of White rabbit, which allows for a distributed real-time system to ensure all components are synchronized at sub-nanosecond accuracy. It was developed at CERN, based on the ethernet technology, while manufactured by commercial companies.

 by the Open make team, Javier Serrano and Amanda Diez Frenandez.

Interview: White rabbit

During the Hannover Messe 2025, we presented the BUA Mobile Lab, and both the Open.Make and the LAUDS Factories projects. We got the chance to talk with experienced experts from industry including engineers, managers, consultants and business leaders about hardware development practices.

Hannover Messe 2025: OSH for industry

Berlin researchers can now access a central lab and a mobile lab to design and produce research hardware. The BUA mobile lab is on tour, with a first stop at the FU Berlin in June 2025. Dear Berlin researchers,   Have you ever heard of makerspaces, 3d printing, or open source research hardware? You may wonder how these concepts are connected with open science and research reproducibility.

OpenMake on tour !

On July the 17th 2025, Julien ran a MINToring workshop in the Making Lab. Young FLINTA students (15-17 years old) were invited in the Making Lab (which is situated inside the TU/UdK library) as part of the MINToring Program of the FU Berlin. We met Dr. Mouawad while being on the FU campus with the Mobile lab. Since we are a BUA project, we could easily collaborate with this initiative from the FU Berlin.