What we can build.
Earth Tools works across six capability areas, from the bench electronics outward to the field site. Most projects draw on several of them.
The sections below describe what the team knows how to do. Projects are scoped against these capabilities, not against a catalog of existing designs.
Hardware & instrumentation
Most of what Earth Tools does sits at the integration level: a specification dictates the hardware, and the hardware gets assembled from subsystems designed against that specification rather than bought off the shelf. Mechanical enclosures, fluid paths, optical trains, electronics, and the firmware tying them together — all built end to end. Scientific instruments are the core, though the same capability extends to consumer electronics, industrial devices, and other product hardware.
Electronics & firmware
Custom boards and embedded firmware run through the work, from scientific instruments to environmental sensors, consumer devices, and IoT hardware. Analog front ends for low-level sensor signals, mixed-signal design, power management for battery-operated products, wireless and wired connectivity, real-time firmware for data acquisition and control — all in scope. Prior projects include hardware deployed unattended for months: underwater, in Antarctica, on moving wildlife, and on buoys, where replacing a failed board isn't an option.
Optics
Light is the most direct route to many of the measurements that matter — molecular composition, cellular structure, the concentration of an analyte in solution. Imaging systems, spectrometers, and custom detector configurations sit at the heart of how Earth Tools makes those measurements. Optical subsystems get built together with the fluidics and electronics around them, so performance is specified at the level of the whole instrument and not the optical bench alone.
Microfluidics
Some experiments only become tractable when the volumes shrink. Flow cells, microchannels, and droplet-based compartments handle samples at scales conventional liquid handling can't reach — and they fit naturally where high throughput, controlled chemistry, or direct integration with optical or electronic readout matters. Each device gets designed around the specific measurement, sample type, and operating envelope it has to serve.
Molecular biology
Strain engineering, assay development, and the characterization of reference biological systems live close to the instruments themselves. A well-characterized biological reference is often what makes a new measurement method reproducible across experiments, operators, and laboratories — so the same group that designs what's measured also designs how it's measured. Assays come with the statistical methods that interpret them, so the output can be evaluated against the sensitivity required by the application.
Ecology & plant science
Outside the laboratory, conditions don't hold still. Field measurements run across soil, water, air, canopy, and crop environments, where instruments have to stay accurate under non-laboratory conditions and study designs have to account for natural variability. Both halves — the hardware and the methodology — are scoped together, so data coming out of the field is reliable end to end.
Technical inquiries and collaboration: hello@earth.tools