The current state of Open Source Hardware 2008 - over 60 projects | Hacker News Reader

The current state of Open Source Hardware 2008 - over 60 projects

blog.makezine.com

16 pointspt8 comments

ArduiPilot - Navigation for UAVs

MAKEcontroller - read a lot about it. Seems it's very easy to program than the Arduino.

Reprap 3D printer (these guys have a very good parts list page which mentions different vendors and also generates a shopping cart for you in the respective vendor's website. So it shouldn't be easy to buy and make it if you have the time and money)

Damn! I wish I wasn't a no-buck-making student anymore. Everytime I look at these stuff, I wanna start making a lot of money to buy and tryout all these stuff and build something... something that's atleast half-good as an IronMan suit.

Two packages that didn't get any coverage on that page:

1) Megasquirt automotive ECUs

2) GNU Radio software defined radio companion hardware

Both fairly esoteric or not generically applicable. I'm glad to see Arduino is becoming so popular -- a lot of people that would have otherwise never learned anything more technical than Adobe Flash are picking up Processing/Wiring/Arduino and making some pretty neat stuff.

I built a Sanguino this morning as it happens. It was quite easy and instantly gratifying. Definitely recommended for any aspiring hardware hackers.

Is open source hardware that much harder to do thats why there aren't a lot of projects out there?

It seems like almost everyone prefers to play with purely virtual things. It always bugged me that there are so many startups out there and almost all of them seem to do web development stuff while so few do more of what I call "real" (i.e involving hardware) After all, we live in a physical world, so shouldn't we be more concerned about stuff that connects to it one way or the other?

There must be reasons to it: software is more easily controllable (you can do everything by the keyboard), software scales more easily (hardware needs factories for mass-production), and inertia of thinking (powered from the previous reasons)

I think that many interesting upportunities utilising the hardware technologies remain unexplored.

I think a lot of it has to do with the cost; software is more or less free to create. So the barrier to entry, hardware-wise, is much higher and requires more capital.

If we don't bill our working time by the hour, software is more or less free to create. Desktop software, that is. But here and now, web-bassed software seems to be all the rage, doesn't it? To accomodate decent amount of concurrent users (tens to thousands) you will need hosting that should cost somewhere around $20 to $300 a month. Maybe somewhere on the $20 a month side for the starters.

Many of the hardware projects, and definitely most of those listed in the original post, can be built with that much worth of parts.

EDIT: But that's just the prototype. After that, you need to build the real product (scale, hardware needs factories for that) and sell it (again easier with software). But this doesn't mean we should only do software because it's easier; otherwise we would be like the proverbial drunkard who kept seeking for his money under the lamppost, because it's brighter over there.

Although these hardware kits are open source, it takes quite a bit more money to try them out. I have tons of open source software apps running on my system, but can only really afford to try out several open source hardware platforms.

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