Developing hardware is hard. It's quite literally in the name. Building a global open source collaboration is also hard, and even harder when every new contributor needs to source physical components.

In general the hardware development toolchain is locked down vastly expensive walled gardens, limiting contribution and collaboration to well funded organisations.

This talk will explore how the OpenFlexure Microscope project uses (and abuses) a whole toolchain of open source software to manage, automate, and accelerate the design of a lab-grade microscope in use all over the world.