McDermott Samuel, Kotar Jurij, Collins Joel, Mancini Leonardo, Bowman Richard, Cicuta Pietro
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Physics, University of Bath, Bath, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2024 Aug 7;11(8):240634. doi: 10.1098/rsos.240634. eCollection 2024 Aug.
There has been an increasing, and welcome, open hardware trend towards science teams building and sharing their designs for new instruments. These devices, often built upon low-cost microprocessors and microcontrollers, can be readily connected to enable complex, automated and smart experiments. When designed to use open communication web standards, devices from different laboratories and manufacturers can be controlled using a single protocol and even communicate with each other. However, science labs still have a majority of old, perfectly functional equipment which tends to use older, and sometimes proprietary, standards for communications. In order to encourage the continued and integrated use of this equipment in modern automated experiments, we develop and demonstrate LabThings Retro. This allows us to retrofit old instruments to use modern Web-of-Things standards, which we demonstrate with closed-loop feedback involving an optical microscope, digital imaging and fluid pumping.
科学团队构建并分享新仪器设计的开放硬件趋势日益增强，这是值得欢迎的。这些设备通常基于低成本微处理器和微控制器构建，能够轻松连接以实现复杂、自动化和智能实验。当设计为使用开放通信网络标准时，来自不同实验室和制造商的设备可以使用单一协议进行控制，甚至相互通信。然而，科学实验室仍有大部分功能完好的旧设备，这些设备往往使用较旧的、有时甚至是专有的通信标准。为了鼓励在现代自动化实验中持续且集成地使用这些设备，我们开发并展示了LabThings Retro。这使我们能够对旧仪器进行改造，使其使用现代物联网标准，我们通过涉及光学显微镜、数字成像和流体泵送的闭环反馈对此进行了演示。
