Pathways to Open-Source Hardware for Laboratory Automation

A group of scientists and engineers interested in using open-source technologies for automating scientific experiments gathered, built, and shared their approaches in Seattle, WA, April 25–27, 2024.

Organized by Machine Agency and the Pozzo Research Group

• Nadya Peek, UW Machine Agency
• Lilo Pozzo, UW Chemical Engineering
• Blair Subbaraman, UW Machine Agency
• Danli Luo, UW Machine Agency
• Brenden Pelkie, UW Chemical Engineering
• Maria Politi, UW Chemical Engineering
• Taylor Hilton, UW Materials Science
• Sam Ferguson, UW Machine Agency
• Wm Salt Hale, UW Machine Agency

Participants

• Sterling Baird, Acceleration Consortium
• Roxanne Balanay, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Peter Beaucage, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Claire Benstead, University of Washington
• Joe Brown, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Keith A. Brown, Boston University
• Yang Cao, University of Toronto
• Gastón Corthey, Universidad Nacional de San Martin
• Tim Dobbs, BioMADE
• Aliénor Lahlou, Sony CSL Paris
• Russell A. Laudone, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Ethan Li, Stanford University
• Benji Maruyama, AFRL
• Nicolás A. Méndez, CONICET
• Matthew Nakamura, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Vinh Nguyen, University of Washington
• Andrew Quitmeyer, Digital Naturalism Laboratories
• Jake Read, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
• C. W. Schlenker, University of Washington
• Aleks Siemenn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Shijing Sun, University of Washington

Schedule

Thursday

6-9p: Introductions and community happy hour at the eScience Institute WRF Data Science Studio

Friday

8:30-9:30a: Arrive at Sieg Building, breakfast

9:30a-6p: Workshop: Working with and building open source hardware for laboratory automation.

Discussion Theme 1: Current challenges of lab automation and open hardware

What are the challenges people are facing when trying to use or develop laboratory automation hardware? There are many different tools already available for laboratory automation, some of which are open source: e.g., OpenTrons, OpenFlexureMicroscope, Mothbox, but integrating them into experimental workflows or developing new tools that are compatible with them remains challenging.

Discussion Theme 2: Community Building, Goal Alignment, Calibration, and Shared Standards

Shared infrastructure implies that we could run the same experiments on each other’s hardware, perhaps using common control algorithms. However, for that to be possible, we need to calibrate and optimize the tools such that they are actually interchangeable, flexible, robust and generalizable. Is this currently already happening? Could it happen? How could we improve data exchange, sharing methods, and learning best practices from the community?

6:30-9:00p: Dinner at Big Time

Saturday

8:30-9:30a: Arrive at Sieg Building, breakfast

9:30a-6p: Workshop: Creating custom science workflows using open-source science hardware/software.

Discussion Theme 3: Where do we go from here?

There are many different (small) communities working on open-source hardware for laboratory automation. Working together could be synergistic, but organizing a larger community also has overhead. What do we think are (realistic) plans for this community moving forward?

6:30-9:00p: Dinner at Big Time

Resources

Code, documentation, and other resources used in the April 2024 workshop can be found in this GitHub repository. Other information such as a link to the Google drive should have been sent to participants in emails from Wm Salt Hale.

Travel Policies

Given that sponsored travel is federally funded, there are a number of guidelines which need to be followed. For instance, if you are considering extending your trip outside of the workshop dates, you must provide an airfare comparison and abide by Fly America Act mandates. Additional travel policy details can be found here.