Just like we have software developed by the community, for the community. Can we have the same ideology applied to hardware ?
Open plans and schematics, interoperable, standardized. I should be able to unplug a component from my computer and plug it into another one. I should be able to replace broken parts. I should be able to, if feasible, make it myself with off the shelf components.
Let’s appreciate general purpose computers before the war against them will be successful.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation
I can’t believe I’d never read that before despite being a fan of Doctorow in general. Thank you. Exceptional work. Should be mandatory reading.
There’s a great talk on the same topic he gave at the Long Now Foundation back in 2012, the Q and A adds a bit to the users vs owners chat
Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer’s camera and network connection.
That was THIRTEEN YEARS ago?!
Quite a good follow up talk posted not so long ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I admit I have only skimmed this yet, but that was 12 years ago. Back then, copyright was a major problem for a free and open society in which people could freely communicate.
The world has changed since then. Those opposed to such a society are now more likely to talk about disinformation, radicalization, child porn, hate speech rather than copyright. Those pretexts aren’t really any better of course.
I think the most compelling reason will be performance.
In enterprise is already soldering ram directly onto the chip, it’s only a matter of time until the same goes for consumer tech. Fusing the chip to the board has benefits too. When most people don’t ever upgrade or repair their computer a 10% speed increase that makes upgrading impossible just makes good business sense.
Free and open source schematics. The schematics being free to build your own.
FOSH
no matter if FOSS or FOSH, it means exactly the same in my native language and it’s funny
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware the big difference is the cost of entry for a software project vs hardware. Software you’re looking at a computer and time. Hardware you need at minimum a few hundred dollars for pcbs, and chips.
Using available goods though, there are things out there. Check out WLED. https://kno.wled.ge/ it’s a software stack that runs on esp32 (mostly) boards to drive LEDs in very fun ways.
While probably not true FOSS hardware, Framework computers make it easy to change and fix
Example; VORON project. 3DPrinters engineered and designed by the project team, contributed to by the community, they don’t sell a product, they share all the plans, BOM and instructions how to make your own 3D printers and even offer a ‘bootstrap’ scheme called ‘print it forward’ where you can pay costs only for parts that have to be printed for the build. VORON
While not community-developed per se, the RISC-V processor architecture is completely open, in contrast to all other architectures which are widely deployed, such as x86, AMD64 or ARM.
Was going to mention this, I see you beat me to it.
You mean like VESC?
Vedder Electronic Speed Controller is an open source set of schematics, a firmware, and a config application for a electronic speed controller for BLDC Motors.
Anyone can use the schematics to build and sell ESCs that can then be programmed for use in a wide range of real-world applications. Some VESC based ESCs are the Stormcore and BKB Xenith. Both run the firmware, and can be configure with VESC tool.
It’s popular all over where hobbyists are building stuff with electric motors. My electric skateboard is powered by one!
There are tons of extensions, remote control systems, support for bluetooth radios for on-the-fly config from a phone, telemetry displays, etc…
Open source hardware is a thing, there are tons of projects on places like Hackaday but it feels to me like it will never quite reach the same level of success as open source software simply because it is much harder to do.
The main exception to this is obviously 3d printing where people happily share their designs and things for people to print and “remix” (i.e. fork) under CC licences.
The problem I think is that electronics is difficult and expensive (especially for “one off” orders for things like PCBs) for the most part which is why you seem to end up with two camps.
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Hobbyists making their own electronics at their own cost and making stuff available. If you are lucky there might be a company willing to make batch orders of the custom parts along with the rest of the components as a DIY kit (which, depending on your soldering skill might be easy or extremely difficult with the possibility of ruining it) or they might pre-assemble the kit for you.
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Companies making OSH products but there is little appetite for anyone to fork it or create a competing version in such a niche space. ClockWorkPi come to mind here with some neat little hand held computers they sell but also make the plans available for. To date I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone making a clone from scratch or forking it to make their own modified version as the cost would be so extreme compared to just ordering the original.
So yeah, I think there is appetite for open source hardware but the high costs, practical electronic skills and ease of damaging expensive parts means that I think things will stay less active in that space. I’d love to see more, for example if super cheap prototype PCBs and pre-assembled kits could be ordered at far cheaper prices than are currently possible. Or an easy and cheap “PCB printer” with associated parts picker/placer/soldering machine to make the process of prototyping a project as easy as just ordering a bunch of generic and off the shelf parts then downloading a file or two to send to the machines. I can dream can’t I?
Edit: Seems desktop PCB printing may be possible for a cool $5k (https://www.voltera.io/v-one) or £11.5k (https://www.fortex.co.uk/product/sv2-pcb-printer/). Maybe we might see a revolution in this space in the not to far future like we saw with 3d printing that brought the technology to the masses.
Edit 2: Somewhat meta - a hackaday project for a pick and place machine - https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place
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You can buy Pine Tab with RISC V processor by Pine 64.
I happen to know one hardware project coming out of CERN that is under an open license, specifically their own CERN OHL.
That’s a pretty interesting example I think.
It does seem to work to a certain degree. We know of four suppliers who build switches according to that projects spec, although there is at least one trying to add proprietary bits in a second product line they push harder.
Would that be open standards or plans? STL files for 3D printing or plans for an effective desk, just supply raw materials and effort.
Sharing only the STL it’s not very open source, It’s like sharing compiled software without the source code. You should share the file of the software you used for modelling such as .CAD or .BLEND.
