The 6 April issue of Nature included a Toolbox feature on the growing use of DIY electronics in scientific research.
Daniel Cressey writes:
Arduinos and similar devices, such as the Raspberry Pi, pack considerable power on their diminutive boards, providing tremendous opportunities for automation, networking and data collection and analysis. For researchers, those features can translate into benefits both economic and practical. Users can shoehorn the systems into tiny spaces, deploy them without monitors or keyboards, buy them in bulk, and pack them into autonomous devices that need to be taken to (and transmit data from) remote field locations. All it takes is a little ingenuity.
A recent article on the bioRxiv preprint server provides a case in point.