Inspired by this movement, an engineering research area has emerged to develop open source scientific hardware and laboratory equipment. As a result to this movement many efforts have been made to define open source hardware and set its best practices.

This trend has been empowered by open source hardware projects such as the RepRap 3D printers and the Arduino platform, which have made manufacturing and electronic technology accessible and affordable. Over the last years there have been a movement towards creating and sharing Open Source Hardware (OSH). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. were supported by Spanish Department of Economy and Competitiveness grant RTC-2015–4167-1 ( this department changed its name) and Spanish Department of Science, Innovation and Universities grant RTC-2017-6218-1 ( ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Source files and CAD files are available in these two repositories: For OpenSCAD: For FreeCAD. Received: AugAccepted: NovemPublished: December 5, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Machado et al. Thus, making it more appropriate to design open source hardware for scientific equipment.Ĭitation: Machado F, Malpica N, Borromeo S (2019) Parametric CAD modeling for open source scientific hardware: Comparing OpenSCAD and FreeCAD Python scripts.

The main benefits are being able to export to standard parametric models using Python language with its libraries and the ability to use and integrate the models in its graphical interface. Our findings show that although Python for FreeCAD is more arduous to learn, its advantages counterbalance the initial difficulties. We have created a parametric open source hardware design to compare these tools. In this work we analyze OpenSCAD and compare it with FreeCAD Python scripts. This is an important deficiency because it is key to share the design in the most accessible formats with no information loss. However, OpenSCAD lacks the ability to export to standard parametric formats thus, the parametric dimensional information of the model is lost. OpenSCAD is the most widely used scripting tool for parametric modeling of open source labware. Parametric design using a solid modeling programming language allows customization and provides a source file for the design. In addition, parametric modeling is encouraged in order to facilitate customization for other experiments. Open source hardware for scientific equipment needs to provide source files and enough documentation to allow the study, replication and modification of the design.

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