Sparkfun's Entire Open Hardware Catalog Made Available On Upverter
An anonymous reader writes "Sparkfun has published their entire catalog of over 500 open hardware designs on Upverter. Anyone can now leverage Sparkfun's designs in their own projects by creating forks and customizing to their heart's desire."
From Wikipedia
It looks to me like the Upverter web site stores your design in the cloud, using their own proprietary web based tool, and you can't save or edit it on your own machine. So it Upverter's site goes down, or if they decide to make you pay for it, or they go out of business, or whatever, your design is lost! I would much prefer to use a truly open solution like gEDA or KiCAD. At least with proprietary and limited Eagle, you can save stuff locally and use it forever.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
All these designs can be gotten in eagle format or something from sparkfun directly
You're not considering the modular nature of electronics.
With open hardware designs you can take a circuit schematic and integrate it with another circuit without having to go to all the trouble of generating it from scratch. Instead of dropping single components into a design you can drop a device like an accelerometer and all associated components as a complete circuit and then produce a PCB with everything on one board.
It's the reason there are so many custom arduino-based variants available - people were able to take the original design then change the form-factor or add something.
Im sure a lot of people boil just thinking about cloud and corporations stealing your ideas (Occupy Thingiverse).
Here is an interview with Upverter guys on theamphour. Dave doesnt take any shit and he hates the cloud so dont expect any PR fluff.
http://www.theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-163-ramiform-reciprocity-raconteurs
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.