Especially when there is little in house entrepreneurial expertise, and when the people bandwidth for this endeavour is limited.
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Related:
I’m really excited about this recent announcement from IORodeo concerning the sale of OpenFlexure Microscope v7 kits:
I’ve been really impressed with OpenFlexure, and even took the “plunge” of sourcing the various components for a Delta Stage Microscope. Seeing the pieces sold altogether as kits through IORodeo, and seeing the collaboration between IORodeo and OpenFlexure is really encouraging! This also brought to my attention the Open Science Shop:
I’m really curious to know tips and recommendations for stocking and distributing these kinds of kits. There is also https://www.labmaker.org/ which is based in Germany (I’ve bought a number of items from their store). When I’ve been asking about the potential for new items, I haven’t gotten a response yet. Likewise, it seems to be a bit more “hands-off”. I.e., it really depends on how well-documented the original project is.
EDIT: The following blog post is relevant:
Hi Sterling, thanks for highlighting IO Rodeo’s collaboration with OpenFlexure! This work came about through the wider Open Science Shop community. Its has been a really fun collaboration for sure. Our hope is that access to the commercial kits will increase the number of people building and using the open hardware OpenFlexure Microscopes!
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So cool to see the vendors page for OpenFlexure Microscope, which has a bunch of initiatives worldwide that focus on commercialization of open-source hardware!
This is a topic on which I’ve been thinking for a while. I gave a presentation some time back hoping it would trigger reactions.
On the one hand, you have the consideration of “openness” and how to share designs that are reproducible. The question of “is a STEP file enough?” or “how to deal with designs done with SolidWorks?” is forever circling back in the microscopy community. Manufacturing is still complex even in the era of “digital manufacturing”.
On the other hand, making projects accessible for purchase has always been in the back of my mind. A possible path is to make it as crowdfunding. It could offset part of the risks and allow for better bulk pricing. However, when I explored this option, no university I discussed with could make it work. For example: Payment is at least 30 days after delivery of goods.
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A while ago, I participated in three rounds of crowdfunding campaigns through GroupGets (e.g., Closed-loop Spectroscopy Lab: Light-mixing Demo Kit | GroupGets), selling the kits effectively at-cost, and shipping a box of the kits to GroupGets for them to distribute to the people who “bought” it. Generally I had the min number set to one (both the at-cost and the minimum set to one were rather strange to the company). GroupGets also stocked a few of the kits in their store, though at quite the premium. IIRC I provided an option for both assembled and unassembled.
It was worth exploring the crowdfunding option, but in the end, parts became available such that I could share a single DigiKey cart that contained the seven items in the kit, and the kit was such that it could be assembled, firmware flashed, and software uploaded in ~30 min with a video walkthrough (also no need to solder or use additional tools). Overhead is virtually zero in this case. We provided a dozen or so kits to collaborators in Germany, just using German DigiKey. The assembly time and cost of each kit is effectively constant when scaled, which is poor from a mass production point of view but not so terrible when replicating it in the hundreds of times. As it’s name “hello world” or “minimal working example” for self-driving labs implies, the distribution was also a minimal working example.
I didn’t go into a ton of detail or copy all aspects from Packaging as a commercial kit · sparks-baird/self-driving-lab-demo · Discussion #124 · GitHub into this post, but it might be worth a peruse and would love to hear if anything sticks out or you think should be surfaces here.
I appreciate you sharing the trend you’ve seen with universities.