Accelerated discovery, high throughput experimentation, and fully autonomous laboratories are central to the future of materials engineering. However, dedicated systems are often just that, purpose built for specific applications and difficult to modify for new projects or niche applications. Our group pursues hybrid automation systems which allow us to accelerate our core research, improve reproducibility, and  enable new research avenues. We explore and encourage our team to leverage the incredible expertise and resources at uOttawa which helps us design our instrumentation and data management resources from the ground up. Our team is committed to applying FAIR principles to our data and to designing research experiments that leverage open software and hardware platforms wherever possible.