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The State of Open Source Hardware In 2008

Posted by Soulskill on from the time-to-pick-a-winter-project dept.

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine has put together their 3rd annual 'State of Open Source Hardware 2008' — in just a few years, the number of projects has grown from a small handful to an amazing 60+ offerings. Similar to open source software, open source hardware is available with source code, schematics, firmware and bills of materials, and allows commercial use. The most popular project, Arduino, the open source prototyping platform for artists and engineers, has shipped over 60,000 units." The article is formatted such that the first link for a particular device will usually take you to the project home page. Some will bring you instead to where you can purchase the items, but most still have a "How To" tab which will direct you to guides and instructions on how to build your own gadgets. There are a bunch of interesting devices, from the Game of Life on the outside of a cube to a home-made MP3 player to OpenMoko.

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. What's new? by svirre · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So what's new with 'open source hardware'?
    I work in a semiconductor company and we got lots of designs including schematics board layouts firmware and BOMs, other companies do the same thing.

    The point is of course to sell our devices by having customers using our designs, but the point is that there are lots of free designs out there, and they have been made available for many years not just the last few as it has been stated in the article.

    1. Re:What's new? by ptorrone · · Score: 3, Informative

      hey davo, i wrote this guide. while there are a lot of arduino projects there are more non-arduino projects. there is a lot going on in the arduino space but it's not fair to ignore all the others in the list: x0xb0x, tvbgone, fuzebox, minimig, openmoko, daisy mp3 player... etc etc.

      these are all really cool projects too.

    2. Re:What's new? by cheater512 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You've never played with a Arduino obviously.
      I've got three of them. Very nifty.

      Actually its not the Arduino its self which is great.
      Its the ATtiny and ATmega processors from Atmel which seriously kick ass.
      Little chips which you can wire up in 5 mins, run at 20mhz and Atmel has very thoughtfully provided patches to GCC.

      You program them with standard C/C++ on any OS you can name and its all open source.
      The Arduino builds upon that.

  2. Re:OpenMoko? by ptorrone · · Score: 4, Informative

    the schematics are here... it's a tough project to make "from scratch" but it's possible...
    http://downloads.openmoko.org/schematics/

  3. open source hardware by Eil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I read this exact same article the other day. Only at that time, it only listed the Arduino and it's progeny along with a couple of related projects.

    In particular, I'm happy to see the x0xb0x make it to the list. The x0x is one piece of open hardware that doesn't nearly get enough attention. It's a perfect clone of the Roland TB-303 analog synthesizer which spawned an entire musical genre and left its impression on electronica in general. The parts list, build instructions, schematics, and board layouts are all open and free and there's an active community supporting and hacking it.

    I consider the x0xb0x to be the perfect example of how to successfully translate the ideals of open source software to hardware hacking.