Million dollar baby – Businesses designing and selling open source hardware, making millions


At O’Reilly’s foo camp east 2010 at Microsoft’s NERD center (MIT campus) we presented “Million dollar baby – Businesses designing and selling open source hardware, making millions” at the Ignite hour. 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide – we tried to capture the excitement and great work from just a few of the dozens of open source hardware companies & resellers. Above, slides, photos & video (m4v). Special thanks to all the companies who helped with some data points and to the OSHW workshop group. There are additional videos/posts/tweet from other attendees, this is our quick video we were able to put together on the train ride back from MA to NYC.


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15 Comments

  1. Great Ignite!

    Nice to see the industry is picking up the steam that it is. This is also the first time I am checking out the resistor captcha, a few words come to mind, super geeky (a good thing)!

  2. Great Ignite!

    Nice to see the industry is picking up the steam that it is. This is also the first time I am checking out the resistor captcha, a few words come to mind, super geeky (a good thing)!

  3. Is there an alternative download for the slide show? I get a ‘slide show removed’ notice when I click through.

  4. @ian – here’s a PDF, slideshare seems broken – http://www.adafruit.com/pt/fooeastignite2010.pdf

  5. I had to comment, just to read the resistor, took me back!!

  6. beagleboard and seeed were added for this post / PDF, etc.. we only have 15 seconds per slide and 20 slides, i’ll do another update for general use later too…

  7. You should add Surveyor Corp and Inertia Labs to your list. Surveyor has been building open source robot controllers since 2005 and Inertia Labs is their manufacturing partner for robot bases.

  8. @hgordon – this isn’t the giant 300+ OSH list, but thanks for posting (the limit was 20 slides, 15 second each). would you say that surveyor is over $1m in revenue and is commercial use allowed? are there complete schematics, etc to download? – pt

  9. Approaching but not over $1m. Commercial use is allowed. Schematics are published on our website (www.surveyor.com/blackfin/#blackfin4) and source code is hosted by Google Code (code.google.com/p/surveyor-srv1-firmware/) with numerous hardware and software projects have that spun off of this development (code.google.com/u/surveyor.com/). We’re based around the Analog Devices Blackfin processor rather than Arduino, so that may be why we don’t show up on your open source radar.

  10. hey! you should add me to this list, because I wrote an instructable!

    seriously, though, this is pretty cool! it really encapsulates the movement overall and shows people who aren’t in the scene how it can be a valid capitalist endeavor. nice work!

  11. @hgordon – thanks, each year (end of year) i do a large *complete* list – i will check these out, thanks!

    buglabs, beagleboard, chumby are not arduino, they’re in there. sparkfun, parallax, adafruit are not all arduino (avr kits, etc) – pt

  12. Next year we’ll be on that list. Ho Yus.

  13. What is there to stop people from improving the designs and them selling them on there site?

  14. Or (in addition to what I said above) what is to stop someone form just taking a open source design and selling it as a kit on there site without changing anything.

  15. hello, luke – nothing at all.

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