The Mothbox is a tool for studying insect biodiversity, but the way in which is was created aimed to incorporate several key design concepts.

Replicable

Open Source

First and foremost, this is an open-source science project! Like EVERY scientific tool, all the information in the hardware and software should be freely available. This is extremely important as the scientific process is broken if the tools used to conduct research are not open and accessible. All the software, hardware designs, and documentation is provided free to use and at your own risk without warantee.

The Open source nature of this is also important to science since it allows other researchers to remix and redesign this project to fit the purposes of other projects. For instance, another researcher is already remixing a mothbox to take high resolution scans of 96-well plates growing various fungi.

Off-the-shelf parts

Low Cost

Simple Flat Design

The mothbox is designed so that all parts can be cut from flat planar material. It is more difficult to design a complex 3D electronic device using only 2 dimensional pieces, but there are several reasons for choosing this approach.

Cross-Compatibility with multiple manufacturing techniques

Objects that are designed flat can be used in a wide variety of manufacturing techniques. Objects that are designed to be 3D printed generally can only be reproduced by 3D printers. Instead these devices can be Laser cut, water-jet cut, CNC milled, 3D printed, cast, or even printed onto paper, traced, and manually cut out of something like 3mm plywood. Fully 3D objects intended to be 3D printed can be dif

Speed of manufacturing

Flat parts can also be rapidly quickly. An entire mothbox can be laser cut in under 20 minutes, whereas a 3D printed version could take several hours. This is especially important to us as the designers since we are rapidly changing around the design to hone its abilities as a field instrument.

#Iterative Contextual Testing

Field Repairable