We explain the mysteries of technology, so you can focus on the mysteries of science. Learn by building. Earn a certificate. Join the network.
Modern experimental science relies on sensors, acquisition systems, computers, and increasingly on machine learning. Most researchers learn to use these tools, but not how they work. This course changes that.
Sensors, acquisition systems, analysis pipelines, you use them daily but the black boxes slow you down when things break or when you need something custom.
Custom hardware, real-time processing, machine learning for your data, the skills your supervisor doesn't have time to teach and no course has covered properly.
Originally designed for neuroscience. Now open to researchers in any experimental discipline. The tools and principles taught here drive progress across all of science.
Each day you open a new set of black boxes, electronics, computers, networks, vision, AI. By the end of the week nothing is hidden. Every layer understood.
Every measurement your lab depends on starts here: how electrons move, how a sensor turns light into voltage, how a transistor turns a signal into motion. You'll build the physical layer of your NB3 robot from first principles — no assumptions, no black boxes.
Understand how logic gates and memory become a programmable processor, then put a microcontroller in charge of your robot's body. By the end of the day your NB3 senses its environment and reacts to it, the same servo-loop logic behind every piece of closed-loop experimental hardware.
Give your robot a real computer. Install Linux on a Raspberry Pi, learn to work entirely from the command line and Git, then write the Python code that talks to your microcontroller, and to the outside world, over a network you build and understand from the socket up..
Give your robot ears and a voice, then learn to make sense of what they hear. You'll stream light-sensor and microphone data live from robot to laptop, then move into the frequency domain, using the Fourier transform and spectrograms to pull a whistled note out of raw audio, the same technique behind any time-series signal analysis. By the end, your NB3 reacts to sound in real time.
Add a camera and learn how light becomes a digital image, streamed live to any browser on your network. Then bring in classical computer vision, face detection, bounding boxes, background subtraction — to close the loop: your NB3 finds a face in its camera feed and turns to track it.
After this course, you will debug faster, design better, and ask questions you couldn't ask before. Not because you became an engineer, because you understand the foundations.
Every year the course is supported by an outstanding group of Teaching Assistants selected from research institutes around the world.
Every participant who completes the course and submits a final project receives an official certificate. But the best projects go further, they are featured on our website and shared directly with our global network of research institutes, labs, and companies.
This is not just a certificate. It is a way to be seen by the right people.
Over 2,000 researchers in 60+ countries have taken No Black Boxes courses. Completing the ESB connects you to this worldwide community of scientists who understand their tools.
One registration. Everything included — kit, lectures, live sessions, and certificate on completion. Shipped anywhere in the world.
Includes worldwide shipping of the NB3 kit, all lectures, full attendance, and course certificate.
£650 for the first participant (including one kit), then £350 per additional participant sharing the same kit. Maximum 3 students per kit.
Express your interest below and we will contact you when applications open for the next edition of the Experimental Neuroscience Bootcamp.