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Nobody who has ever made a commercial product for a living would be trumpeting a new industrial revolution brought on by open reference designs. Fact is: that s

by krapht 13y ago

Nobody who has ever made a commercial product for a living would be trumpeting a new industrial revolution brought on by open reference designs. Fact is: that stuff is there already. Component manufacturers literally have field application engineers who are just waiting to send you reference designs that use their products, if you're working at the PCB & discrete parts level. Hardware designs are already open in a way that can't be matched by software - you can look at a product, take it apart, and :voila: - you have the design in a way that is far easier to grok than disassembling a closed binary. Many high end products have full schematic drawings included with the technician's repair manual. Anything novel enough to be patented has mechanical drawings and a full description listed in the patent. The only things you can't take apart are ASICs and other computer chips. But BFD!? Any player in that space has to have hundreds of thousands just to prototype one, let alone rent time in an IC fab to make them. If you have that kind of money, there's plenty of fab-specific IP floating around for your use at nominal prices. Open source software is revolutionary because the incremental cost of duplicating bits is nearly zero. The same can't be said for hardware. In fact - it's worse. The smaller a player you are, the more expensive it is to duplicate a design. And it is a pain in the rear to duplicate designs if they're at all pushing the envelope, since manufacturing tolerances and capabilities differ so much from outfit to outfit. Can you imagine the pain and suffering you'd go through porting software that relies heavily on compiler-specific directives? Well, it's like that when you move from one factory to another. Some Chinese outfits have met with success with open / copycat hardware. I'd argue that's less a result of open reference designs and 3d printing and more of drastically reduced labor and part costs, all situated in a global hub of electronics manufacturing.

zwieback 13y ago
Couldn't agree more. I've worked for small companies and now work for a very large company with lots of leverage. Conservatively I would guess that we have 1-2 years of advantage over a startup when competing for the attention of large component suppliers. Just getting the lawyers on both sides to agree on a NDA can be a big production. On the other hand, when a mega company joins up with another mega company, e.g. phone manufacturer and processor supplier, there's a lot of risk aversion on both sides due to the large investments. There's a crack in the system somewhere that small innovative companies can take advantage of but I don't think open reference designs do much more than documenting the state of the art. That's great for hobbyists but makes little difference in the high-volume commercial space.
drone 13y ago
Have you considered the value in OSHW is not necessarily in enabling well-trained engineers so much as making "effective engineers" out of hobbyists? Sure, one trained in electronics can look at a PCB and surmise its function - but for one not trained, they would do to understand what each section of that design does, and why it does it. "Why would part X be used in this design? What is its function?" OSHW to me, is more enabling the long tail of invention. To be fair, I think a lot of the users of OSHW development platforms are looking for the right combinations of components to make their software designs effective. I see a lot of stuff out there that is little more than re-packaging of a dev kit in a cheaper to produce form, but with software that enables it to fulfill a new purpose. So, yes, a lot of us do see OSHW as a meaningful activity with a meaningful outcome. I'm sorry that you think it's pointless for people to share their electronics designs (Sheesh, can't everyone who wants to make something buy something else that does exactly that and copy it by looking at a board?) Truth be told, we could say the same thing about software: I can observe what it does given any specific input, therefore I could replicate it - who needs source code?!
- krapht 13y ago
  Don't get me wrong, OSHW does have some value exactly as you said: it's a great learning tool for hobbyists and those new to field without the money to reverse engineer a product. But that is not the buzz that is being written by journalists and Silicon Valley cheerleaders who foresee a future of boutique micro-manufacturing and bespoke designs for everyone. A game I like to play when this type of article comes up is to replace every instance of the word hardware with furniture. So when someone talks about open source hardware, pretend they are talking about open source furniture. The hyperbole used in this type of article will become quickly apparent.
  - drone 13y ago
    I do see a lot of boutique micro-manufacturing in the future for electronics, just not for "everyone." In my mind, the trend is going towards enabling small-market, very "niche" products from fairly amateur inventors. This market still isn't being served well by the HMLV EMS houses. The size of an acceptable, affordable, EMS run should approach 1 in the not-so-distant future. But, yeah, this is people writing about a trend - at least the OSHW writing as a whole is still less exasperated than the 3D printing articles, which mostly seem to boil down to: "OMG, you'll be able to make anything in 30 seconds at home for free!"
redangstrom 13y ago
While FAEs (field apps engineers) are helpful and readily available, they are constrained by their lack of product knowledge, and the unidirectional flow of reference code and designs. On the design side, I hope that the energy and continued improvement the open source software community has will spill over to hardware. I think that would greatly improve the accessibility of the hardware world, and facilitate new product development and innovation. Proprietary hardware reference designs and tools (whether it be for schematic capture, logic synthesis) etc, while tried and tested, often lack the polish and open interfaces, hence extensibility, good open source systems have. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly glad we have Verilator and gEDA. On the manufacturing front, I feel your pain (mostly on behalf of my colleagues).
gregsq 13y ago
I'll agree with this as well. There's a massive amount of reference designs available, from ARM Cortex M embedded designs to, and in no particular order, ADC's, motor controllers, power supplies, touch sensors and so on from vendors like Freescale, NXP, Texas Instruments and so on and on. A15's plus hybrids like Exynos's and Omap5's are fairly closed, but for most of the real time functional apparatuses many want to play with, if excluding Ethernet and GPU's, these aren't the most suitable anyway. For serious hobbyists there are some interesting off the shelf SoC's. The main challenges are about production.

by krapht 13y ago

zwieback 13y ago

Couldn't agree more. I've worked for small companies and now work for a very large company with lots of leverage. Conservatively I would guess that we have 1-2 years of advantage over a startup when competing for the attention of large component suppliers. Just getting the lawyers on both sides to agree on a NDA can be a big production. On the other hand, when a mega company joins up with another mega company, e.g. phone manufacturer and processor supplier, there's a lot of risk aversion on both sides due to the large investments. There's a crack in the system somewhere that small innovative companies can take advantage of but I don't think open reference designs do much more than documenting the state of the art. That's great for hobbyists but makes little difference in the high-volume commercial space.

drone 13y ago

Have you considered the value in OSHW is not necessarily in enabling well-trained engineers so much as making "effective engineers" out of hobbyists? Sure, one trained in electronics can look at a PCB and surmise its function - but for one not trained, they would do to understand what each section of that design does, and why it does it. "Why would part X be used in this design? What is its function?" OSHW to me, is more enabling the long tail of invention. To be fair, I think a lot of the users of OSHW development platforms are looking for the right combinations of components to make their software designs effective. I see a lot of stuff out there that is little more than re-packaging of a dev kit in a cheaper to produce form, but with software that enables it to fulfill a new purpose. So, yes, a lot of us do see OSHW as a meaningful activity with a meaningful outcome. I'm sorry that you think it's pointless for people to share their electronics designs (Sheesh, can't everyone who wants to make something buy something else that does exactly that and copy it by looking at a board?) Truth be told, we could say the same thing about software: I can observe what it does given any specific input, therefore I could replicate it - who needs source code?!

krapht 13y ago
Don't get me wrong, OSHW does have some value exactly as you said: it's a great learning tool for hobbyists and those new to field without the money to reverse engineer a product. But that is not the buzz that is being written by journalists and Silicon Valley cheerleaders who foresee a future of boutique micro-manufacturing and bespoke designs for everyone. A game I like to play when this type of article comes up is to replace every instance of the word hardware with furniture. So when someone talks about open source hardware, pretend they are talking about open source furniture. The hyperbole used in this type of article will become quickly apparent.
- drone 13y ago
  I do see a lot of boutique micro-manufacturing in the future for electronics, just not for "everyone." In my mind, the trend is going towards enabling small-market, very "niche" products from fairly amateur inventors. This market still isn't being served well by the HMLV EMS houses. The size of an acceptable, affordable, EMS run should approach 1 in the not-so-distant future. But, yeah, this is people writing about a trend - at least the OSHW writing as a whole is still less exasperated than the 3D printing articles, which mostly seem to boil down to: "OMG, you'll be able to make anything in 30 seconds at home for free!"

redangstrom 13y ago

While FAEs (field apps engineers) are helpful and readily available, they are constrained by their lack of product knowledge, and the unidirectional flow of reference code and designs. On the design side, I hope that the energy and continued improvement the open source software community has will spill over to hardware. I think that would greatly improve the accessibility of the hardware world, and facilitate new product development and innovation. Proprietary hardware reference designs and tools (whether it be for schematic capture, logic synthesis) etc, while tried and tested, often lack the polish and open interfaces, hence extensibility, good open source systems have. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly glad we have Verilator and gEDA. On the manufacturing front, I feel your pain (mostly on behalf of my colleagues).

gregsq 13y ago

I'll agree with this as well. There's a massive amount of reference designs available, from ARM Cortex M embedded designs to, and in no particular order, ADC's, motor controllers, power supplies, touch sensors and so on from vendors like Freescale, NXP, Texas Instruments and so on and on. A15's plus hybrids like Exynos's and Omap5's are fairly closed, but for most of the real time functional apparatuses many want to play with, if excluding Ethernet and GPU's, these aren't the most suitable anyway. For serious hobbyists there are some interesting off the shelf SoC's. The main challenges are about production.