Better Hardware, Better Research
Jo Walsh 
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
April 9, 2025
The SSI Fellowship Scheme
- Not just for Research Software Engineers
- Focus on community building and organising
- £4000 budget available for expenses
- Doesn’t, however, cover one’s time
- 2025 Fellowship Cohort
Field electronics and sensors
- In-house Field electronics and sensors training
- Developed originally by Milo Brooks in Bangor
- Delivered by Rob Nicoll and Neil Mullinger in Edinburgh
- Intensive two days, beginner-friendly
Course takeaways
- It’s a really good, densely-packed course
- I need to run through it all again on my own!
- Invaluable tips from field service experience
- Beautiful simplicity of some of the sensing techniques
- Subtleties of interpretation in dataloggers
A real strength for UKCEH
- UKCEH has a lot of good people doing this work
- Instrument and field engineers, and also researchers
- Engineering Workshop skills and tools in Wallingford
A paper based on an Engineering Workshop prototype
“Better Hardware, Better Research”
- Better Software, Better Research
- Better Training, Better Production, Better Software
- Better Access, Better Review, Better Software
- Better Recognition, Better Software
- Better Funding, Better Software
- Better Software, Better Science
Open Science Hardware
- Gathering for Open Science Hardware - active community
- Audiomoth - Open Acoustic Devices - fieldwork in UKCEH by Jenna Louise Lawson
- AMI System built by the Engineering Workshop, code by Alba Gomez Segura
- LabCrafter - UK startup creating “Open tools for open science”
Open Source Hardware in general
- OSHWA - Open Source Hardware Association
- Open Hardware Summit
- Wuthering Bytes Festival which includes a one-day “OSHCamp”
- My Bike’s Got LED - example OSHWA-certified project
- RC2014 Mini II Picasso - community around a kit, with joy!
