About Labrigger
Labrigger is a source for open solutions for research. The goal is to accelerate and enable research by reducing the duplication of effort by multiple labs, facilitating development of innovative instrumentation, and connecting the community to create new collaborations and information exchanges. From time to time, less formal posts are interspersed. The themes are include neuroscience, optics, computation, research, and academia.
Labrigger is curated by Spencer LaVere Smith.
In addition to the Labrigger resources, the Nemonic project shares code, videos, and other resources.
History
Smith: “I started Labrigger in 2010 as a notepad. I was answering occasional technical questions I received from colleagues in email, and I would then cut-and-paste it into the blog in case others found it useful. They did, and still do, so I keep maintaining Labrigger. All of the costs are paid from my personal funds. No grant funding is used for it, and there are no ads. I run Labrigger to help colleagues and facilitate neuroscience research. Posts and comments are all timestamped, so please keep their age in mind when referring to them.”
Impact
There are thousands of unique individual visitors to Labrigger each month. The technical posts have enduring value impact, for example there are 10-year old posts that still receive hundreds of visits per month. References to Labrigger posts have shown in up in peer-reviewed papers published by SPIE, Nature Publishing Group, and PLoS. This beneficial impact is not tracked like paper citations, and it shows up in interesting ways. For example, for >300 lines of code in the widely used (>300k downloads) Psychtoolbox codebase, the authors “almost literally copy and pasted the code from Labrigger” (quote from a comment in the code). A commentary I wrote on US patent law and open science was cited in a 2022 Nature Methods commentary. Thus, the impact is significant, but difficult to summarize. Regardless, colleagues find it useful, and that is enough reward, and so I’ll keep running Labrigger.
Disclaimer / Caution
Neither Labrigger, blog post authors, nor anyone else associated with Labrigger can vouch for the safety of any projects mentioned on this site. In fact, we attest that many of them are dangerous. Don’t try building anything unless you’re properly trained and supervised. Lasers, high voltage, chemicals, power tools, and many other things discussed on this website are dangerous. Assume that all projects discussed on this site are dangerous and consult with experts to keep yourself safe.