Plug, Play, Inspire: Leveraging recent electronics advancement for scientific outreach

Creating interactive display and experiments for the public or education, is often seen as a difficult task by scientists and communication specialists, or as a costly thing when hiring external services to build you vision – in particular when involving electronics. This statement could actually not be more wrong.

The last decade has seen a revolution in the domain of electronics components, in particular programmable ones, as well as the development of a large quantity of resources online to help the occasional crafter and tinkering to achieve their goals.

In this talk, I’ll present some open-source experiments I developed in the recent years using Arduino, an open-source platform that combines easy-to-use hardware and software. The plethora of resources available online for Arduino make it accessible to any astrophysicist, with no extra skills in electronic engineering or software development required.

Rather than presenting in lengthy details the devices I designed, assembled, coded and created, I will rather focus on the design process and describes the technology used, its advantages and drawback, as well as discuss potential alternatives or complementary tools such as 3D printing which recent technology revolution as made affordable to any institute.

I will present the spectroscopy table and the Trappist-1 lightshow devices which were created for public interactions as well as to be useful for the classroom. And I will also discuss a “Rover-making” extra-curricular activity I propose in a nearby school for children aged 9-14, including skills such as project management, 3d modelling, 3d printing, electronics assembly and coding.

Additionally, I will also discuss past projects carried at my university and the difficulty encountered with their maintenance given their earlier designs. Finally I will mention a future project going to the next level in leveraging the adaptability and ease-of-use of Arduino.