7 ms·

More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

326 points by iosifnicolae2 7mo ago

Neywiny 7mo ago
Feels weird to advertise a microcontroller dev board this way. But the other stuff is cool
- amstan 7mo ago
  Yeah, it's worse, half of the devices on that list are peripherals that cannot be flashed with any firmware.
  - iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
    yeah, it's true, but the idea was to also have some useful peripherals indexed, so when users are searching for a use case, they'd also have these plug-and-play peripherals in the search results. but i'm open to feedback so we can make a better experience for all of you ;)
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
Also, prices for everything is 1.5 - 2.5X.
- sam1r 7mo ago
  I wonder what (api?) creators are using to programmatically calculate this pricing.
  - sam1r 7mo ago
    I strongly feel that each board should display pricing in two ways 1. Market price. buy now price. 2. Get it used (used market price).
  - iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
    we were scraping the prices using claude code and pushed them with an mcp to the directory
haddonist 7mo ago
Looks good, but it'll probably take a while until it's anywhere close to the coverage of existing repositories: https://templates.blakadder.com/ https://templates.blakadder.com/ has almost 3,000 devices flashable onto Tasmota firmware. For older Tuya devices there's https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter OpenBeken https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App covers 800 of the newer generation Tuya devices. And there's a large community adapting ESP32 devices onto https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/
- sandos 7mo ago
  Oh, esphome is more than only esp32 these days. For one it always worked on the pre-esp32 ESPs. But yeah, RPI2040, nrf52 and a couple of other platforms work too.
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  Yup, it will take a bit of time until we index as many devices as possible. Also, we need to invest a bit more to make the AI search faster and much better. (If anyone has any ideas, we're open to feedback.) Also, I'm curious — how do you think we can make the device pages even better? My personal problem is that I want to find devices for a specific use case, and the issue is that it's pretty hard to extract real-life use cases for all the scraped devices. We will need a way to extract these insights from the internet.
  - adrianwaj 7mo ago
    Great idea. You could have discussion under each device, or else have a forum where devices can be selected and tagged. Maybe a "builds" page where devices have been implemented in end user setups. Also, I've seen motherboards/SBCs from China where it is impossible or difficult to find Bios updates, especially in English. This is for the Mini PC market. Have you seen sbcwiki.com - they have a news, software and tutorials section. A lot of HN activity in this space: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=SBC&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... Another idea is to build up wishlists and ownerlists around devices. Good resource for people looking for ideas/help. Can have photos too.
randyrand 7mo ago
more often than not, you could just buy the same new CPU on the open market and swap it in. It bypasses secure boot, etc.
zdw 7mo ago
There are another ~3k devices on the OpenWRT table of hardware that would fall into this category: https://toh.openwrt.org/ https://toh.openwrt.org/
- tkel 7mo ago
  This is "Open Hardware" which usually means open PCB or chip schematics, so people can modify or extend the board. OpenWRT is "Open Software that runs on closed hardware". After checking a couple, Kind of seems like a lot of boards on this "open hardware" list might not actually be open hardware? Here's an example of what open hardware is supposed to be: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/hardware/ubertooth-one https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/h...
  - phoronixrly 7mo ago
    Yeah, that OnePlus phone is defo the very opposite of open hardware...
    - seba_dos1 7mo ago
      If one's looking for an actual open hardware smartphone: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic
  - iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
    by open, we mean that you can flash your own firmware. - but yes, we will need to check manualy each device/board or improve the Claude Opus prompt to make sure that it's doing a very good research when extracting these devices
skyberrys 7mo ago
Well I fell down an RGB keyboard rabbit hole there. At first I thought I wouldn't find something compelling in this list but it only took me to the second scroll to get drawn in. The end result was a customizable keyboard from Canada. Can I give it a link to my weird (but open) hardware?
Karliss 7mo ago
The link was posted by project's author so probably should have been Show HN. Feels more like AI slop list of "a bunch of hardware that you can buy from hobbyist electronic stores" which has no idea what it wants to be, shiny on surface but deeper you look less sense it makes. Not surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software development using Artificial Intelligence." Good chunk of that stuff is not open hardware by any definition -> neither the hardware design being open nor the firmware not even community written firmware for proprietary hardware. If you ignore the poor description of the site is the parametric search at least good? The values in parameter dropdowns seem to be filled based on currently displayed items, that might be fine for narrowing down once you already made a search but for initial search it means you get random subset of available values. The fact that whole thing is non-categorized, random mix of mismatched type of hardware doesn't make the parametric search better. Good parametric search needs well curated and structured database of descriptions made by people who understand corresponding product category, otherwise it's garbage in garbage out. Having to wait half a minute while AI is reticulating splines even when you used quite specific keywords isn't a good search experience either. So if it's not a good list of open hardware, not a good list of hardware you can flash open firmware, not a good search for electronic components what is it good for? Only value I see is as a fuzzy set of links and ~~tags~~ for exploring a subset of related hardware topics. Edit: not tags those are broken. #tags return error, other tags(uses cases) and other other tags(compatible firmware) in many cases returns only 1-2 results which doesn't even include the item where you clicked on tag even though there are a lot more items using it.
- phoronixrly 7mo ago
  Agreed, alarm bells started ringing with the OnePlus phone that is the very opposite of open hardware...
  - iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
    we are scraping the products using Claude Opus and we also saw some problems.. we will have to review everythign manually and improve (not an easy job.. but if it's useufl for people, we will do it -- i did not expected so much demand for it)
anonymous_user9 7mo ago
AI slop. Most of the things on this list are not open hardware, and some of the items are completely proprietary. For example, the SLAMTEC RPLiDAR A1 [1]. This part doesn't even have user-upgradeable firmware. [1] https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1 https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1
matheusmoreira 7mo ago
Please add the Sensor Watch to the list. It's an amazing project which created an open source replacement PCB and and even a custom LCD for the legendary Casio F-91W. Fully customizable open source firmware. It's got a temperature sensor which makes it a world class temperature compensated quartz watch. I've contributed some work to it. Improved the pulsometer so it could also be used as an asthmometer which I really needed. Also improved the TOTP auth apps a bit. I was even one of the maintainers for a while. It's an awesome project to hack on. Lots of nice people in the community. Highly recommended.
- Rygian 7mo ago
  I'm looking for: - a watch face to show the next seasons - a watch face to upload/download data (using the photoresistor diode to receive, and the led and/or chirp-fx to send) - how can I increase storage? I can't upload the astronomy face!
reggieprevail69 7mo ago
[dead]
- goodpoint 7mo ago
  very poorly
cultureulterior 7mo ago
All of your sensors are lies
voidUpdate 7mo ago
How many of these are something that a normal consumer would buy, e.g. not a dev board that you can obviously flash your own code onto? I was sort of hoping for a list of things like "spotify car thing", "facebook portal" (I know neither of those are flashable yet, they've just been on my mind) and them maybe a list of projects for them or a link to a wiki page or something
t23414321 7mo ago
What about penalty points for AI slop ?
scientism 7mo ago
Not commenting on the content itself (others have done it better) but anybody getting tired of seeing the same vibe coded websites over and over again?
- elaus 7mo ago
  It really is boring and lifeless. Most of those vibe coded sites have senseless boilerplate UI like the "send feedback" link that opens "beautiful" UIs that are completely without function.
- RobotToaster 7mo ago
  There seems to be an inverse relationship between the flashiness of a website and the quality of it's content.
- giorgioz 7mo ago
  I actually didn't notice since there weren't gradients. On one side what you are saying it's true but on the other side it rings like "it was better when it was worse" which I always despised in the past. It's hard to accept when it's your own craft that is being automated but we must move on. Otherwise we'll be like the mechnical clockmakers complaining about Casio watches.
  - basilikum 7mo ago
    No, this is absolutely just worse. The past wasn't all glory. There always were countless bad design patterns. But this is just bad. It's just the continuation of degenerative design principles that oppose information, functionality and control.
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  yup, i totally agree. i was focusing on the functionalities first, later we can do a redesign to not feel like ai slop
pshirshov 7mo ago
> more than 135 136?
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  now, we've indexed 463 :) but we will index more and more boards and make the platform as good as we can
type0 7mo ago
The name is closely deceptive to sound like open-source hardware
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  Yes, we need to better explain our name. I was creating this website for myself because I'm a developer and I want to change the firmware on existing boards, as I don't have that much experience with electronic circuits and so on.
dogman1050 7mo ago
Having used only various ESP and RPi types, I found the article informative and the comments moreso. AI slop or not, a list is a good place to start.
isodev 7mo ago
Sorry not sorry - ai;dr; Based on the title, I like the idea. It would be cool if manufacturers are more deliverable with their releases of firmware and developer tools. Like... if you're selling refurbished versions of a product, it makes sense that it's internals and firmware are open source.
ahaucnx 7mo ago
[dead]
Leif24 7mo ago
Wow, the UX kind of sucks. I just wanted to browse the devices - no way to do that, only option is an 'ai' search. Ok, I type in "Show All Devices" and it canoodles for about 30 seconds (great use of compute resources) only to apparently come up with the phrase "Browse all devices available in the directory without specific project-based filters." that it then seems to feed into the actual search tool... which then shows no results. Two thoughts - (1) is your device list some state secret that you have to hide behind a search functionality? Because it would be nice to be able to browse through it without needing to engage in some sort of 'search'. (2) can you provide another option besides an ai search that is so intelligent that it has superseded the ability to do wildcard searches? Edit: same feedback, but for the projects section as well.
- wasmitnetzen 7mo ago
  There's a paginated list on the front page for me. Maybe already fixed?
  - iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
    yup :) thx for the feedback
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  - by default, we are displaying all the devices so you can just scroll through the list - if you want to get all the devices for a specific use-case, you can setup filters - no, the search list is not secret.. you can even convert any page to markdown https://openhardware.directory/devices/md https://openhardware.directory/devices/md - you just have to add /md to any page - also, you can browse it with llms.txt (https://openhardware.directory/llms.txt https://openhardware.directory/llms.txt) I'm open to new ideas on how to improve the search experience
lokimoon 7mo ago
[dead]
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  yup, we have to work on improving the search, this is just the MVP :)
adrianwaj 7mo ago
see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457874 - https://www.fossilware.tech/ https://www.fossilware.tech/ Note for each item: "I remember this", "I owned one" Also interesting for the directory would be "I made it" - for people who actually designed/built a device. Good for them to get feedback about a device (for future versions) from real users after they claim a device to be theirs. Also note the historic aspect of fossilware whereby the directory could be used as a time capsule thing too. Another thing about keeping track of ownership is for recycling. At some point, people could opt to dispose of a device, and recyclers could be prepared for any particular unit that they hope to recycle and contact the directory to organize a return. Would that make economic sense? Perhaps it could be done on a city-by-city basis?

326 points by iosifnicolae2 7mo ago

Neywiny 7mo ago

Feels weird to advertise a microcontroller dev board this way. But the other stuff is cool

amstan 7mo ago
Yeah, it's worse, half of the devices on that list are peripherals that cannot be flashed with any firmware.
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  yeah, it's true, but the idea was to also have some useful peripherals indexed, so when users are searching for a use case, they'd also have these plug-and-play peripherals in the search results. but i'm open to feedback so we can make a better experience for all of you ;)

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago

Also, prices for everything is 1.5 - 2.5X.

sam1r 7mo ago
I wonder what (api?) creators are using to programmatically calculate this pricing.
- sam1r 7mo ago
  I strongly feel that each board should display pricing in two ways 1. Market price. buy now price. 2. Get it used (used market price).
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  we were scraping the prices using claude code and pushed them with an mcp to the directory

haddonist 7mo ago

Looks good, but it'll probably take a while until it's anywhere close to the coverage of existing repositories: https://templates.blakadder.com/ https://templates.blakadder.com/ has almost 3,000 devices flashable onto Tasmota firmware. For older Tuya devices there's https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter OpenBeken https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App covers 800 of the newer generation Tuya devices. And there's a large community adapting ESP32 devices onto https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/

sandos 7mo ago
Oh, esphome is more than only esp32 these days. For one it always worked on the pre-esp32 ESPs. But yeah, RPI2040, nrf52 and a couple of other platforms work too.
iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
Yup, it will take a bit of time until we index as many devices as possible. Also, we need to invest a bit more to make the AI search faster and much better. (If anyone has any ideas, we're open to feedback.) Also, I'm curious — how do you think we can make the device pages even better? My personal problem is that I want to find devices for a specific use case, and the issue is that it's pretty hard to extract real-life use cases for all the scraped devices. We will need a way to extract these insights from the internet.
- adrianwaj 7mo ago
  Great idea. You could have discussion under each device, or else have a forum where devices can be selected and tagged. Maybe a "builds" page where devices have been implemented in end user setups. Also, I've seen motherboards/SBCs from China where it is impossible or difficult to find Bios updates, especially in English. This is for the Mini PC market. Have you seen sbcwiki.com - they have a news, software and tutorials section. A lot of HN activity in this space: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=SBC&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... Another idea is to build up wishlists and ownerlists around devices. Good resource for people looking for ideas/help. Can have photos too.

randyrand 7mo ago

more often than not, you could just buy the same new CPU on the open market and swap it in. It bypasses secure boot, etc.

zdw 7mo ago

There are another ~3k devices on the OpenWRT table of hardware that would fall into this category: https://toh.openwrt.org/ https://toh.openwrt.org/

tkel 7mo ago
This is "Open Hardware" which usually means open PCB or chip schematics, so people can modify or extend the board. OpenWRT is "Open Software that runs on closed hardware". After checking a couple, Kind of seems like a lot of boards on this "open hardware" list might not actually be open hardware? Here's an example of what open hardware is supposed to be: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/hardware/ubertooth-one https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/h...
- phoronixrly 7mo ago
  Yeah, that OnePlus phone is defo the very opposite of open hardware...
  - seba_dos1 7mo ago
    If one's looking for an actual open hardware smartphone: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  by open, we mean that you can flash your own firmware. - but yes, we will need to check manualy each device/board or improve the Claude Opus prompt to make sure that it's doing a very good research when extracting these devices

skyberrys 7mo ago

Well I fell down an RGB keyboard rabbit hole there. At first I thought I wouldn't find something compelling in this list but it only took me to the second scroll to get drawn in. The end result was a customizable keyboard from Canada. Can I give it a link to my weird (but open) hardware?

Karliss 7mo ago

The link was posted by project's author so probably should have been Show HN. Feels more like AI slop list of "a bunch of hardware that you can buy from hobbyist electronic stores" which has no idea what it wants to be, shiny on surface but deeper you look less sense it makes. Not surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software development using Artificial Intelligence." Good chunk of that stuff is not open hardware by any definition -> neither the hardware design being open nor the firmware not even community written firmware for proprietary hardware. If you ignore the poor description of the site is the parametric search at least good? The values in parameter dropdowns seem to be filled based on currently displayed items, that might be fine for narrowing down once you already made a search but for initial search it means you get random subset of available values. The fact that whole thing is non-categorized, random mix of mismatched type of hardware doesn't make the parametric search better. Good parametric search needs well curated and structured database of descriptions made by people who understand corresponding product category, otherwise it's garbage in garbage out. Having to wait half a minute while AI is reticulating splines even when you used quite specific keywords isn't a good search experience either. So if it's not a good list of open hardware, not a good list of hardware you can flash open firmware, not a good search for electronic components what is it good for? Only value I see is as a fuzzy set of links and ~~tags~~ for exploring a subset of related hardware topics. Edit: not tags those are broken. #tags return error, other tags(uses cases) and other other tags(compatible firmware) in many cases returns only 1-2 results which doesn't even include the item where you clicked on tag even though there are a lot more items using it.

phoronixrly 7mo ago
Agreed, alarm bells started ringing with the OnePlus phone that is the very opposite of open hardware...
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  we are scraping the products using Claude Opus and we also saw some problems.. we will have to review everythign manually and improve (not an easy job.. but if it's useufl for people, we will do it -- i did not expected so much demand for it)

anonymous_user9 7mo ago

AI slop. Most of the things on this list are not open hardware, and some of the items are completely proprietary. For example, the SLAMTEC RPLiDAR A1 [1]. This part doesn't even have user-upgradeable firmware. [1] https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1 https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1

matheusmoreira 7mo ago

Please add the Sensor Watch to the list. It's an amazing project which created an open source replacement PCB and and even a custom LCD for the legendary Casio F-91W. Fully customizable open source firmware. It's got a temperature sensor which makes it a world class temperature compensated quartz watch. I've contributed some work to it. Improved the pulsometer so it could also be used as an asthmometer which I really needed. Also improved the TOTP auth apps a bit. I was even one of the maintainers for a while. It's an awesome project to hack on. Lots of nice people in the community. Highly recommended.

Rygian 7mo ago
I'm looking for: - a watch face to show the next seasons - a watch face to upload/download data (using the photoresistor diode to receive, and the led and/or chirp-fx to send) - how can I increase storage? I can't upload the astronomy face!

reggieprevail69 7mo ago

[dead]

goodpoint 7mo ago
very poorly

cultureulterior 7mo ago

All of your sensors are lies

voidUpdate 7mo ago

How many of these are something that a normal consumer would buy, e.g. not a dev board that you can obviously flash your own code onto? I was sort of hoping for a list of things like "spotify car thing", "facebook portal" (I know neither of those are flashable yet, they've just been on my mind) and them maybe a list of projects for them or a link to a wiki page or something

t23414321 7mo ago

What about penalty points for AI slop ?

scientism 7mo ago

Not commenting on the content itself (others have done it better) but anybody getting tired of seeing the same vibe coded websites over and over again?

elaus 7mo ago
It really is boring and lifeless. Most of those vibe coded sites have senseless boilerplate UI like the "send feedback" link that opens "beautiful" UIs that are completely without function.
RobotToaster 7mo ago
There seems to be an inverse relationship between the flashiness of a website and the quality of it's content.
giorgioz 7mo ago
I actually didn't notice since there weren't gradients. On one side what you are saying it's true but on the other side it rings like "it was better when it was worse" which I always despised in the past. It's hard to accept when it's your own craft that is being automated but we must move on. Otherwise we'll be like the mechnical clockmakers complaining about Casio watches.
- basilikum 7mo ago
  No, this is absolutely just worse. The past wasn't all glory. There always were countless bad design patterns. But this is just bad. It's just the continuation of degenerative design principles that oppose information, functionality and control.
iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
yup, i totally agree. i was focusing on the functionalities first, later we can do a redesign to not feel like ai slop

pshirshov 7mo ago

> more than 135 136?

iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
now, we've indexed 463 :) but we will index more and more boards and make the platform as good as we can

type0 7mo ago

The name is closely deceptive to sound like open-source hardware

iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
Yes, we need to better explain our name. I was creating this website for myself because I'm a developer and I want to change the firmware on existing boards, as I don't have that much experience with electronic circuits and so on.

dogman1050 7mo ago

Having used only various ESP and RPi types, I found the article informative and the comments moreso. AI slop or not, a list is a good place to start.

isodev 7mo ago

Sorry not sorry - ai;dr; Based on the title, I like the idea. It would be cool if manufacturers are more deliverable with their releases of firmware and developer tools. Like... if you're selling refurbished versions of a product, it makes sense that it's internals and firmware are open source.

ahaucnx 7mo ago

[dead]

Leif24 7mo ago

Wow, the UX kind of sucks. I just wanted to browse the devices - no way to do that, only option is an 'ai' search. Ok, I type in "Show All Devices" and it canoodles for about 30 seconds (great use of compute resources) only to apparently come up with the phrase "Browse all devices available in the directory without specific project-based filters." that it then seems to feed into the actual search tool... which then shows no results. Two thoughts - (1) is your device list some state secret that you have to hide behind a search functionality? Because it would be nice to be able to browse through it without needing to engage in some sort of 'search'. (2) can you provide another option besides an ai search that is so intelligent that it has superseded the ability to do wildcard searches? Edit: same feedback, but for the projects section as well.

wasmitnetzen 7mo ago
There's a paginated list on the front page for me. Maybe already fixed?
- iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
  yup :) thx for the feedback
iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
- by default, we are displaying all the devices so you can just scroll through the list - if you want to get all the devices for a specific use-case, you can setup filters - no, the search list is not secret.. you can even convert any page to markdown https://openhardware.directory/devices/md https://openhardware.directory/devices/md - you just have to add /md to any page - also, you can browse it with llms.txt (https://openhardware.directory/llms.txt https://openhardware.directory/llms.txt) I'm open to new ideas on how to improve the search experience

lokimoon 7mo ago

[dead]

iosifnicolae2 7mo ago
yup, we have to work on improving the search, this is just the MVP :)

adrianwaj 7mo ago

see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457874 - https://www.fossilware.tech/ https://www.fossilware.tech/ Note for each item: "I remember this", "I owned one" Also interesting for the directory would be "I made it" - for people who actually designed/built a device. Good for them to get feedback about a device (for future versions) from real users after they claim a device to be theirs. Also note the historic aspect of fossilware whereby the directory could be used as a time capsule thing too. Another thing about keeping track of ownership is for recycling. At some point, people could opt to dispose of a device, and recyclers could be prepared for any particular unit that they hope to recycle and contact the directory to organize a return. Would that make economic sense? Perhaps it could be done on a city-by-city basis?