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Open Source Hardware Projects, 2009
ptorrone writes "MAKE's yearly open source hardware guide is now online with over 125 projects in 19 categories. The creators of all of these projects have decided to publish completely all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings, and 'board' files to recreate the hardware. They also allow any use, including commercial. In other words, you can make a business making and selling any of these objects. This is similar to open source software like Linux, but hardware-centric."
Look under the "religious" projects. Finally a Christmas card that looks more geeky than the "iphone with cardboard" posted earlier on /.
Agree with you. And also, software should be free (as in free speech) due to the inherent nature of software (lines of code). OTOH, one can choose not to display the schematics of the hardware thus preventing someone from duplicating it. Of course, in most cases, one can open it up and reverse engineer it; however not so easy with microchips and the like. I find "open source hardware" just a fashionable tag people use to promote themselves.
I consider my model airplane design open source because I made the plans available. People have built them all over the world and have added revisions to the plans. Is that what makes it open source? Here is the URL: http://www.rubber-power.com/
Inventor, Artist http://www.Rubber-Power.com
I looked into microcontrollers like six or seven years ago and was pretty much scared away.
The Arduno's ecosystem has helped in that area. There was a previous generation of microcontrollers with hobbyist support, the PIC and the Basic Stamp. Those devices were getting rather dated; the Basic Stamp is descended from a 1970s National Semiconductor part. Moving to Atmel's ATmega128 was a step up, with 32-bit registers and a hardware multiplier. The industrial world made that step up a decade ago, but the hobbyist world was still struggling along with limited hardware. This is one of the reasons that entry-level hobbyist robots hadn't gotten much smarter for over a decade.
Although Atmel offered a complete set of free development tools for the ATmega line, they were never presented in a hobbyist-friendly format. Atmel has a huge range of products, and this is just one of many. It's not at all obvious what to order and download.