  Open clusters, which have age, abundance, and extinction information from
studies of main-sequence turn off stars, are the ideal location in which to
determine the mass-luminosity-radius relation for low-mass stars. We have
undertaken a photometric monitoring survey of open clusters in the Galaxy
designed to detect low-mass eclipsing binary systems through variations in
their relative light curves. Our aim is to provide an improved calibration of
the mass-luminosity-radius relation for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, to
test stellar structure and evolution models, and to help quantify the
contribution of low-mass stars to the global mass census in the Galaxy. In this
paper we present our survey, describing the data and outlining the analysis
techniques. We study six nearby open clusters, with a range of ages from $\sim
0.2$ to 4 Gyr and metallicities from approximately solar to -0.2dex. We monitor
a field-of-view of > 1 square degree per target cluster, well beyond the
characteristic cluster radius, over timescales of hours, days, and months with
a sampling rate optimised for the detection of eclipsing binaries with periods
of hours to days. Our survey depth is designed to detect eclipse events in a
binary with a primary star of $\lesssim 0.3~M_{\sun}$. Our data have a
photometric precision of $\sim 3$ mmag at $I\approx 16$.
