Opentrons new OT-2, and great video about open source in science

Super impressed both with their new hardware, but also with their philosophy. They are traditional VC funded and scaled both in terms of their production capacity and their community, but have remained (or so it seems) fully open. Really nice video.

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Thanks for posting. Indeed it’s a good video. It’s nice to see OpenTrons getting investement and also nice to see Michael Cousins make an appearance (kind of unrelated but Michael developed the circuit board renderer I use for Kitspace).

It seems like with the OT-2 they are now trying to figure out what open source hardware means when crucial parts are injection molded and thus not replicable at home, see e.g. discussion on Hacker News.

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It’s ok if it’s a question of speed, I totally get that. It really isn’t easy to share designs when working in a large team across time and space, when there’s tight timelines and last minute changes. I’ve been there.

I see this a lot of open communities - people get really pushy if someone is slow to making things public because (sometimes rightly so) it’s seen as a delay tactic to have your cake (say your open source) and eat it to (but never really share your designs)… But sometimes it’s just a matter of taking a little time to make sure what becomes public is usable and well managed.

So - the new version is certainly less DIY, which is less good but understandable and necessary on certain designs, but hopefully just as well documented.

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