GitBuilding: A software package for clear and consistent documentation
of instrument assembly
- Julian Stirling ,
- Kaspar Bumke ,
- Richard Bowman
Abstract
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.