Open-Source Hardware Is a Low-Cost Alternative for Scientific Instrumentation and Research

Scientific research requires the collection of data in order to study, monitor, analyze, describe, or understand a particular process or event. Data collection efforts are often a compromise: manual measurements can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in data being collected at a low frequency, while automating the data-collection process can reduce labor requirements and increase the frequency of measurements, but at the cost of added expense of electronic data-collecting instrumentation. Rapid advances in electronic technologies have resulted in a variety of new and inex-pensive sensing, monitoring, and control capabilities which offer opportunities for implementation in agricultural and natural-resource research applications. An Open Source Hardware project called Arduino consists of a programmable microcontroller development platform, expansion capability through add-on boards, and a programming development environment for creating custom microcontroller software. All circuit-board and electronic component specifications, as well as the programming software, are open-source and freely available for anyone to use or modify. Inexpensive sen-sors and the Arduino development platform were used to develop several inexpensive, automated sensing and datalog-ging systems for use in agricultural and natural-resources related research projects. Systems were developed and im-plemented to monitor soil-moisture status of field crops for irrigation scheduling and crop-water use studies, to measure daily evaporation-pan water levels for quantifying evaporative demand, and to monitor environmental parameters unde