4 ms·

Out of curiosity, what sort of "useful, practical object[s]" are people looking for? And are there any hardware-centric sites where one can find an existing fr

Out of curiosity, what sort of "useful, practical object[s]" are people looking for? And are there any hardware-centric sites where one can find an existing free hardware project to contribute to?

larrydag 10y ago
I thought the same thing. Perhaps there needs to be a "hardware Product Hunt" for collaborative hardware projects. This almost gets you there. It just needs to be tagged as FSF compliant. https://www.producthunt.com/topics/hardware https://www.producthunt.com/topics/hardware
analog31 10y ago
In my view, free hardware has been around forever, and it's all over the place, but folks haven't created the kinds of organized group projects like in free software. Going back to before the computer age, scientific publication embodied free hardware design: When you reported a result, you were expected to provide enough information that a reasonably skilled person could replicate your study. This is a principle of scientific methodology that I learned from my parents, who are both scientists. I apply this principle to my projects, and it seems like a reasonable model for folks who want to create reproducible work but have not learned how to use modern project management tools like revision control. Starting roughly a century ago, people started publishing designs in magazines, for instance in the ham radio literature. An informal tradition (reinforced by the editorial policies of some magazines) was to publish the design and parts list, but offer things like printed circuit boards, parts kits, and even finished units, for a nominal fee. I published a handful of articles in that literature, in the 1990s. By that point, hardware contained code, and the magazine would maintain a source code repository at their website. Free software grew along the same lines: Magazines would print source code listings that people could type into their microcomputers. I'm sure that scientists shared code informally. What I think is lacking in hardware, is the kind of organized group activity that we've seen in software: Big open-source projects like Linux or Python. Hardware people, especially hobbyists, just don't know how to create or manage a project like that. I certainly don't. But if you look in the Arduino or Raspberry Pi worlds, you'll find plenty of open hardware designs.
- mbanzi 10y ago
  I thought one could consider Arduino a "big open source project" we've been working on open hardware for 11 years and we have millions of users. The big question is : Does open hardware really matter to people? The Raspberry Pi keeps getting mentioned next to Arduino but it's not open hardware but this doesn't seem to matter. The original group of OSHW enthusiasts has been diluted in the larger maker/hobbyist market which is very price sensitive and buys the cheapest HW regardless of who makes it or if they are upstanding citizens of the open source world.
  - analog31 10y ago
    Indeed, those are some good points, and a good question. My impression is that hardware hackers are largely oblivious to contemporary OSHW issues. For instance, relatively few are even aware that Arduino is open and RPi isn't, and what the actual issues are. I tend to be more concerned with being able to use a design in the future if one of my vendors vanishes or a part goes obsolete, and my solution to that problem is to make stuff that runs on multiple platforms, or can be easily ported. I doubt it's just a matter of price. The main problem may be that open design evolved at a time when stuff was a lot simpler, and not driven by code. In 1980, I took a schematic for a guitar pedal in a magazine, and build one myself, with no copyright issues. You can't copyright a circuit, and it's damn hard to patent one. There was no EULA to prohibit me from taking my gear apart. An issue with software is that the author has to do something proactive, in order to make it copy-able. That's probably an over-simplification, but at the very least you have to negate the implied copyright by replacing it with something permissive like the MIT license. So, there are "sins of omission" that threaten the open-ness of software (and of hardware containing software) that are only beginning to emerge in the hardware hobby.
    - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
      Doesn't the Arduino use a proprietary microcontroller?
      - analog31 10y ago

Out of curiosity, what sort of "useful, practical object[s]" are people looking for? And are there any hardware-centric sites where one can find an existing free hardware project to contribute to?

larrydag 10y ago

I thought the same thing. Perhaps there needs to be a "hardware Product Hunt" for collaborative hardware projects. This almost gets you there. It just needs to be tagged as FSF compliant. https://www.producthunt.com/topics/hardware https://www.producthunt.com/topics/hardware

analog31 10y ago

In my view, free hardware has been around forever, and it's all over the place, but folks haven't created the kinds of organized group projects like in free software. Going back to before the computer age, scientific publication embodied free hardware design: When you reported a result, you were expected to provide enough information that a reasonably skilled person could replicate your study. This is a principle of scientific methodology that I learned from my parents, who are both scientists. I apply this principle to my projects, and it seems like a reasonable model for folks who want to create reproducible work but have not learned how to use modern project management tools like revision control. Starting roughly a century ago, people started publishing designs in magazines, for instance in the ham radio literature. An informal tradition (reinforced by the editorial policies of some magazines) was to publish the design and parts list, but offer things like printed circuit boards, parts kits, and even finished units, for a nominal fee. I published a handful of articles in that literature, in the 1990s. By that point, hardware contained code, and the magazine would maintain a source code repository at their website. Free software grew along the same lines: Magazines would print source code listings that people could type into their microcomputers. I'm sure that scientists shared code informally. What I think is lacking in hardware, is the kind of organized group activity that we've seen in software: Big open-source projects like Linux or Python. Hardware people, especially hobbyists, just don't know how to create or manage a project like that. I certainly don't. But if you look in the Arduino or Raspberry Pi worlds, you'll find plenty of open hardware designs.

mbanzi 10y ago
I thought one could consider Arduino a "big open source project" we've been working on open hardware for 11 years and we have millions of users. The big question is : Does open hardware really matter to people? The Raspberry Pi keeps getting mentioned next to Arduino but it's not open hardware but this doesn't seem to matter. The original group of OSHW enthusiasts has been diluted in the larger maker/hobbyist market which is very price sensitive and buys the cheapest HW regardless of who makes it or if they are upstanding citizens of the open source world.
- analog31 10y ago
  Indeed, those are some good points, and a good question. My impression is that hardware hackers are largely oblivious to contemporary OSHW issues. For instance, relatively few are even aware that Arduino is open and RPi isn't, and what the actual issues are. I tend to be more concerned with being able to use a design in the future if one of my vendors vanishes or a part goes obsolete, and my solution to that problem is to make stuff that runs on multiple platforms, or can be easily ported. I doubt it's just a matter of price. The main problem may be that open design evolved at a time when stuff was a lot simpler, and not driven by code. In 1980, I took a schematic for a guitar pedal in a magazine, and build one myself, with no copyright issues. You can't copyright a circuit, and it's damn hard to patent one. There was no EULA to prohibit me from taking my gear apart. An issue with software is that the author has to do something proactive, in order to make it copy-able. That's probably an over-simplification, but at the very least you have to negate the implied copyright by replacing it with something permissive like the MIT license. So, there are "sins of omission" that threaten the open-ness of software (and of hardware containing software) that are only beginning to emerge in the hardware hobby.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    Doesn't the Arduino use a proprietary microcontroller?
    - analog31 10y ago