Experimental & Statistical Techniques 🔍

Usage Requirements: Windows, Mac, Linux, or Docker OS

LabVIEW by National Instruments (NI) is by far one of the most widely used software in labs around the world for connecting, automating, and controlling hardware and collection of data using a unique "circuit board"-like graphical programming language. Visually design logic gates, controls, and data acquisition/display panels that can either be used for analysis locally or with configuration of external hardware. It's a crucial, complex tool that is also fun to play around with and create simple projects. While the professional version is only available for purchase, a community version is offered for free, and if you're not working with advanced instruments or algorithums, it should cover just about everything you need.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington

Usage Requirements: Windows, Mac, Linux, or Docker OS

Possibly one of the most commonly used software for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs) for electronics. Design a PCB board as a .kicad_pcb file and an associated schematic (quite literally a circuit diagram) as a .kicad_sch file, export as a Gerber file, and have your circuit printed by a reliable company such asPCBWay. When laboratories need a circuit to accomplish a specific digital or mechanical task, it's common to have scientists design their own on software such as KiCad. A similar software produced by Autodesk is EAGLE.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington

Usage Requirements: Internet Connection and Browser

Designed to help researchers color-code maps and cartography, ColorBrewer 2.0 assists the user in selecting color schemes appropriate for data visualization. Use this tool to improve choices for colorblind accessibility, determine appropriate contrast, or just test how a set of colors may look when illustrating attributes of your data.

Contributor: Amelia Binau on behalf of Prof. Mark Messier, Indiana University - Bloomington

Usage Requirements: Internet connection and internet browser

Convenient location for many relevant and contemporary fields/topics in the optics space including geometric optics, lasers, electromagnetism, material optical properties, signal processing. Has very concise and well-written articles that simplify concepts and explanations and provide citations to begin a deeper dive if you so choose. you can just search any relevant topic and add RP photonics to the end of your search query to find their article or you can just navigate on their website. Topics and subtopics are broken up in categories.

Contributor: Gabriel Skowronek - University of Central Florida (UCF)

Usage Requirements: Internet Connection

NotebookLM is an AI Research tool developed by Google which can summarize, make connections, and answer questions from uploaded PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, and Google Slides.

Robert C. Laughlin, Indiana University - Bloomington

Usage Requirements: Internet Connection

SciSpace is an AI specifically for locating relevant articles for research topics. Use SciSpace to help speed up the process of finding relevant articles, it's like a more direct Google Scholar. SciSpace really helps with finding papers to read if you're getting into a field or doing a literature review.

Jonathan Sullivan-Wood

Language Requirements: Python. Usage Requirements: Python-Compatable IDE

Scikit-Learn is an open-source package that offers an expansive library of statistical functions necessary for most machine learning applications. A former Google Summer of Code project, Scikit offers tools for just about any machine learning or optimization problem. Regressions, decision trees, classification models, Naive Bayes methods, model evaluation, just about any supervised or unsupervised model functionality is availble. It even has visualization support.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington

Language Requirements: Python, Terminal. Usage Requirements: Python-Compatable IDE

Very useful and fast Python package manager that makes Python version and dependency management really simple. Packages and their versions are listed and updated easily in a pyproject.toml file, where additional project settings/configs can also be managed.

Contributor: Johnathan Gutierrez, Indiana University - Bloomington

Supplies vendor; paid merchandise.

The go-to for many labs' hardware needs. Whether it's a bolt of highly specific specificiations or a more general machine shop tool, just about anything needed for designing a physical experiment of any proportion can be found here. McMaster-Carr is reliable and you can browse product specifications in great detail.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington

Supplies vendor; paid merchandise.

My favorite supplier of electronic components, from heavy-duty hardware to breadboard components to microelectronics, you can get however many of whatever you need of any tolerance, size, shape, voltage, wattage, capacitance, durability, or material. All of the most random, niche electronic parts you could think of, it's quite fun to browse and the company is quite reliable. Great for identifying electrical equipment without much prior knowledge, too, perhaps just a description or ID number.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington

Supplies vendor; paid merchandise.

All of the PCBs (printed circuit boards) I've made for lab use I've had printed by PCBWay and they've always been great quality for a reasonable price. Draft up any board you can dream of in a Gerber file and they'll print it for you. Custom, pre-assembled boards are available, as well.

Contributor: Amelia Binau, Indiana University - Bloomington