Better Hardware, Better Research

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

The programme of workshops and documentation ended quietly, for reasons that were hard to accept. Enough time has passed now to make steps towards its future again.

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.