Reverse Engineering Lab

RELab documentation

RELab is a research platform for collecting and publicly viewing data on the disassembly of durable goods, developed by the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University. It supports structured data collection, media capture, and later analysis of product composition, materials, and circularity.

Start Here

• Getting Started Create an account, document a first product, and learn the core workflow.

• Guides Task-first help for data collection, hardware setup, RPI camera use, and API workflows.

• Architecture System design, data model, API, auth, and deployment.

• Project Context Use cases, roadmap, dataset goals, and research framing.

Quick Links

• Open the platform
• Open the API docs
• View the repository

Research Motivation

Primary product data — material makeup, component structure, circularity-relevant properties — is still hard to obtain for many durable goods. RELab takes a bottom-up approach: instead of relying on producer-controlled information flows, the platform lets repairers, refurbishers, dismantlers, recyclers, and citizen scientists contribute structured observations directly, and is designed to interoperate with existing industrial-ecology databases rather than stand alone.

Current System At A Glance

• backend/: FastAPI application with PostgreSQL, Redis, Alembic migrations, file handling, and plugin routes
• frontend-app/: Expo / React Native app for authenticated data collection
• frontend-web/: Astro site for the public-facing web presence
• docs/: Astro Starlight docs app for public, operator, and contributor-facing reference

Canonical repo entry points live in README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md. Install and self-hosting steps live on this site at Install & Self-Host.