Better Hardware.
Better Research.

This started as a Fellowship from the Institute for Research Software - "Better Software, Better Research" is literally their t-shirt slogan.

The initial programme of workshops has ended, and we're making steps towards the bigger picture.

Impact

• Libby Miller, who organised the first workshop, "Nature Listening" and whose prior work inspired the programme, has gone on found a startup, Bristol Nature Telemetry. The workshop also provided a LoRaWAN gateway for a community centre in a deprived area of Bristol.
• The second workshop on "Build a Birdbox" led to a successful workshop proposal for Electromagnetic Field and brought 15 attendees from varied backgrounds, reusing the components
• The organisers of the third workshop on "Project Arlo" reproduced the session at a "train the trainers" workshop in the Wits Innovation Centre in Johannesburg with attendees from research institutions across Africa, leaving infrastructure in place.

Original concept

Back in 2024, we started thinking like this:

We believe that the principles of open, reproducible research software should apply equally to research hardware.

Open Science took its inspiration wholesale from the open source software movement. A new role of Research Software Engineer evolved to help make research software open and reusable in the service of reproducible research.

The picture for research hardware still looks quite different. Closed-source black boxes, proprietary drivers, annual licences, mobile data contracts.

• How can researchers and inventors move the dial on open research hardware?
• How can we untap potential by asking not what can our sensors sense? but what do we want to know?

Better Hardware, Better Research is an effort to answer these questions. We bring together environmental field researchers with hobbyist inventors and owners of small open hardware businesses in a workshop series. Over tea and soldering irons we share experiences, compare pain points and prototypes, and identify field sites where long term monitoring and open networks could combine for some really fruitful experimentation.

A workshop series supported by the Institute for Research Software Fellowship Programme in 2025.

A panel talk at the Open Hardware Summit in Edinburgh, May 30th-31st 2025.