Famous open hardware stores are adafruit, sparkfun and seeed studio. Besides these, sysmocom is specially focused on mobile network related selling sim tracer hardware kit. If you come across web-site selling open hardware products, do include in comments section, preferably site should have more open hardware product than close product (so Digikey, mouser etc are rule out even though they sell few open hardware products.)
BeagleBone
October 31st, 2011 by virals No comments »BeagleBone is open hardware platform in line with BeagleBoard having AM3358 microprocessor based on ARM Cortex-A8 core. Design of BeagleBone is done with approach of supporting CAPS. CAPS are add-on boards which can be develop over a period of time as per additional peripheral requirement. This is pretty much in line with Arduino‘s shield concept. Priced at 89 USD, it’s quite affordable with the kind of features it is providing. But it misses on board display support such as VGA, DVI-D or HDMI.
Design material (Schematic, Gerber, BoM etc) for BeagleBone are available here.
RHINO : Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for Computing and Radio
August 12th, 2011 by virals 1 comment »Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for Computing and Radio (RHINO) is open source hardware project primary targeted to students and researchers in Software Defined Radio (SDR) domain. It has powerful Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA (XC6SLX150T) and Texas Instruments ARM Cortex-A8 based AM3517. Although, quite a few similar open source projects are ongoing such as
- Casper ROACH (Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware)
- Products from Ettus Research LLC, such as USRP N200, USRP E100 and USRP1 (Yes they come with schematic.)
But, RHINO looks quite impressive with kind of peripheral it provides. RHINO schematics can be found here, but at current moment gerber (PCB layout) is not available, hope developers do publish them eventually. Borph Linux runs on RHINO platform.
Arduino
December 29th, 2010 by virals No comments »Arduino is most active and successful open hardware project. One of major reason is simple hardware and simple language to program with flexible and easy-to-use modules.
Person having basic electronics knowledge can start with Arduino in an hour or so. Furthermore, Availability and price of Arduino boards is major advantage. Plenty of country has local vendor (including some having multiple vendors.) The add-on card such as blue tooth shield or Wi-Fi shield makes it more usable. Arduino forum and wiki are best place to get any help related to Arduino.
Based on exact purpose of project, you can select best Arduino hardware. Ethernet, Xbee and motor shield can be quite useful for experiment. Typical Arduino core has ATmega series chip-set.
Event : Open Hardware Summit, New York
September 22nd, 2010 by virals No comments »As mentioned in events page, Open Hardware summit is going to be held at New York on 24 September, 2010.
It will be quite interesting open hardware community. The event has prime focus on Bussiness, Production, Law, Design & Education.
We also hope that after this summit better licence for open hardware projects be available. Event schedule looks quite interesting.
Maker Faire will follow on 25 & 26th September at NYC.
Business of open source hardware
July 5th, 2010 by virals No comments »Business of making and selling open source hardware is growing with quite a few project have revenue above million dollar. This was presented in recently organized foo camp by adafruit. Slide:
Open source hardware – foo camp east 2010
View more presentations from ada fruit.
Video: Open source hardware $1m and beyond – foo camp east 2010
