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.)
Archive for the ‘general’ category
Open Hardware Store
December 28th, 2011Event : Open Hardware Summit, New York
September 22nd, 2010As 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, 2010Business 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
GSM (in)security remains open question , But What’s next ?
January 3rd, 2010As appeared recently in world wide media & as demonstrated during 26c3,
GSM handset contains insecure firmware.
Original GSM specifications were published around 20 years before. Interestingly, GSM specifications are open, but has only few open source implementation. GSM uses A5/1 encryption algorithm which has became open over a period of time.
Now, Project such as OpenBTS provides open source implementation of Base Transceiver Stations ś software, while OpenBSC provide open source implementation Base Station Controller.
Issue at hand : Around 4 Billion GSM handsets are already deployed & containing insecure firmware. Now what ? Any Fix is available ? What is way-out of this problem ?
Above are still open questions.
But lets understand root cause of this problem,
- All the implementation of GSM stack where closed source.
- Access to firmware (source code as well as binary) were not available to general hacker, making it nearly impossible to understand it.
- GSM stack remained in hands of (very few) close source commercial developer for years.
- If a open implementation of GSM stack was available (at-least for scientific study), it could have reviewed by world-wide hackers.
- Similar to TCP/IP protocol, over a period of time, it could have become more secure.
Lesson to learn: We should learn from this mistake & should not repeat same for upcoming 3G, LTE, 4G & related standards. These standard should have open source implementation (including hardware as well as software).
All About Open Hardware : Init()
January 1st, 2010This web-site & blog is an attempt to provide information on various on going open hardware related projects. It is intended to keep readers of this blog update about any newly launched open hardware project.
Furthermore, This site is more focused on projects which are aiming for electronics device or equipment, compare to other related projects.
As in last decade, In software world, everyone has seen power of open source software projects, We strongly believe, in coming decade various open hardware projects will shine & out perform close source hardware.
Wish you Happy (hardware) hacking ! ! !
