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Sparkfun's Entire Open Hardware Catalog Made Available On Upverter

Posted by timothy on from the print-'em-out dept.

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."

9 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Huh? by cpicon92 · · Score: 5, Informative

    From Wikipedia

    SparkFun Electronics (sometimes known by its abbreviation, SFE) is an electronics retailer in Boulder, Colorado, United States. It manufactures and sells microcontroller development boards and breakout boards.

  2. Upverter is a dead end for your project? by Z-MaxX · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Upverter is a dead end for your project? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Upverter lets you export in Open JSON. There's an open source converter on GitHub. Like whoever said, try using the Internet, you may discover stuff

    2. Re:Upverter is a dead end for your project? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 3, Funny

      According to Bill Gates the Internet is just a fad.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  3. Advert for Upverter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    All these designs can be gotten in eagle format or something from sparkfun directly

  4. Huh? by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 2

    What do I need open source forks for?

    --
    Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
  5. Re:Huh? by martinux · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Interview with the Upverter Founders (theamphour) by citizenr · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  7. Re:Huh? by ThosLives · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.

    I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.

    --
    "There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)