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Michigan Technological University

Michigan Tech Publications

Open source hardware

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Full-Text Articles in Materials Science and Engineering

Open Source 3d-Printable Planetary Roller Screw For Food Processing Applications, Marcello C. Guadagno, Jacob M. Loss, Joshua M. Pearce Apr 2021

Open Source 3d-Printable Planetary Roller Screw For Food Processing Applications, Marcello C. Guadagno, Jacob M. Loss, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications

Historically, open source agriculture (OSA) was based on grassroots technology generally manufactured by hand tools or with manual machining. The rise of distributed digital manufacturing provides an opportunity for much more rapid lateral scaling of open source appropriate technologies for agriculture. However, the most mature distributed manufacturing area is plastic, which has limited use for many OSA applications. To overcome this limitation with design, this study reports on of a completely 3D-printable planetary roller screw linear actuator. The device is designed as a parametric script-based computer aided design (CAD) package to allow for the easy adaption for a number of …


Economic Savings For Scientific Free And Open Source Technology: A Review, Joshua M. Pearce Oct 2020

Economic Savings For Scientific Free And Open Source Technology: A Review, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications

Both the free and open source software (FOSS) as well as the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) has shown particular promise among scientists for developing custom scientific tools. Early research found substantial economic savings for these technologies, but as the open source design paradigm has grown by orders of magnitude it is possible that the savings observed in the early work was isolated to special cases. Today there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines and several resources dedicated specifically to publishing them. Do the tremendous economic savings …


Open Source Completely 3-D Printable Centrifuge, Salil S. Sule, Aliaksei Petsiuk, Joshua M. Pearce May 2019

Open Source Completely 3-D Printable Centrifuge, Salil S. Sule, Aliaksei Petsiuk, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications

Centrifuges are commonly required devices in medical diagnostics facilities as well as scientific laboratories. Although there are commercial and open source centrifuges, the costs of the former and the required electricity to operate the latter limit accessibility in resource-constrained settings. There is a need for low-cost, human-powered, verified, and reliable lab-scale centrifuges. This study provides the designs for a low-cost 100% 3-D printed centrifuge, which can be fabricated on any low-cost RepRap-class (self-replicating rapid prototyper) fused filament fabrication (FFF)- or fused particle fabrication (FPF)-based 3-D printer. In addition, validation procedures are provided using a web camera and free and open …