GitBuilding: A software package for clear and consistent documentation of instrument assembly

Scientific instrumentation is the lifeblood of experimental science. However, novel instrumentation that is developed in research laboratories is often not reproducible. Not only are the detailed designs and assembly information rarely published with instrumentation papers, this knowledge is often not adequately record by the original research group. As staff members move on the knowledge of how to recreate this information is lost. The inability to recreate instruments and experimental setups from published work helps drive the reproducibility crisis in science. We present a new software and data structure for capturing assembly instructions and design information as an instrument is built, in a semi-automated and machine readable way. The data structure can also describe multiple configurations of the same instrument with minimal data duplication. This program was designed to aid the open sharing of scientific hardware designs as research data, but would equally be applicable for preserving institutional knowledge of custom instrumentation.