The Worlwide List of Open Source Hardware Online Stores @ MakingSociety.

Don’t spend any more time browsing desperately the internetz to find parts for your RepRap, Arduino kits or local sensors and PCBs distributors for your new project. I put together this worldwide list of online stores selling open source hardware. There is a big chance your country is in it and that you will finally find your favourite local online store to get open source electronics, robotics, parts, kits, materials and supplies for your hardware projects.

The Good Life Lab is pre-launching at Maker Faire. It comes out in stores everywhere June 5 and can be preordered on Amazon

Bios

Wendy Tremayne was a creative director in a marketing firm in New York City before moving to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where she built an off-the-grid oasis in a barren RV park with her partner, Mikey Sklar. She is the founder of the textile repurposing event Swap-O-Rama-Rama, which has spread all over the world. She has written for Craft’s webzine and Make magazine and, with Mikey Sklar, keeps the blog Holy Scrap.

Mikey Sklar is a digital homesteader, open source hardware developer and anti-griddle master. Mikey has worked for Adafruit, Hack-A-Day and Popular Science.

Wendy & Mikey are giving three presentations @ Maker Faire, San Mateo, CA

Meet the Maker Stage
Saturday May 18, 2013 03:30PM – 3:50

Homegrown Village Stage
Sunday May 19, 2013 11:30AM – 12:20

Swap-O-Rama-Rama – Talk and Book Signing
May 20, 2013 03:20PM – 3:40

Tour Schedule

Holy Scrap Blog

Note from Ladyada & pt @ Adafruit: We’ve known Wendy & Mikey for years, we’ve visited their place in Truth or Consequences and it was one of the best experiences ever. They shared a preview of the book with us and it’s inspirational tale for all makers. If you’re at Maker Faire this weekend, go see them and either way, pick up this book!

This is an Arduino porting of the excellent work by Markus Frejek.
The final aim is to create an economic component tester using Arduino and a few passive components;

You can see more about ArduTester in our Arduino Forum.

Three-Dimensional Printing and Open Source Hardware @ Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law (JIPEL).

This Article shows how the maturing technology of three-dimensional printing can be used to construct an enforceable open hardware license. Open hardware lacks the legal tools which allow the easy implementation of enforceable open source software licenses. As such, existing licenses cannot successfully implement open hardware principles. The author proposes the “Three-Dimensional Printing Open License” (the “TDPL”). The TDPL draws on the unique characteristics of three-dimensional printing to construct a license that incorporates enforceable documentation, attribution and copyleft provisions. As the technology of three dimensional printing improves and is gradually integrated into a broad range of industries, the scope of the license’s application will increase.

Open Source Hardware and Maker Spaces Make Sense for Libraries.

Griffey showed many examples where Arduino-based hardware cost a third or even a tenth of retail goods.  Assuredly some had added features and may have been more aesthetically pleasing, but even this customization is likely not far in the future, and as the software is open source, it can be modified to meet individual needs.  

For libraries this serves two purposes. 

First, it joins an arsenal consisting of 3D printers, knitting clubs, soldering torches, library farms, recording studios and other maker spaces.  Some have asked whether these devices are just expensive toys with little in the way of utilitarian value.  By incorporating devices that serve obvious real world concerns, it becomes easier (and more cost effective) to incorporate a maker space into a wide variety of libraries. 

Second, as library budgets continue to be reduced in many communities, these devices offer an opportunity for cost-saving measures that unlike some open source software solutions will not see all of their savings lost through highly technical hours of labor.

Open source hardware is fairly new (Arduino and Raspberry Pi first came onto the scene in 2005 and 2006, respectively) and it is possible to overestimate their future impact.  However, I believe that they have the possibility to inspire a new form of technical interaction for our culture, built not on consumption, but on participatory creation.  Where better to start than your local library? 

OSHUG Is Three: Event @ Centre for Creative Collaboration, London:

On the 18th April 2013, 18:00 – 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG, [map] (51.529049, -0.116436)

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

The twenty-fifth meeting marks our third anniversary, and will feature a talk on writing embedded firmware and a panel discussion that will explore the future of open source hardware.

Writing firmware for the AVR: A Morse Code Beacon

In this talk we will look at a number of techniques for making the most of the miniscule MSP430 and ATTiny embedded microcontrollers. Explaining how to approach the task of developing software for constrained systems such as those with only a few hundred bytes of RAM or a few kilobytes of Flash. Predominantly writing in C and using Chris Swan’s Morse Code Beacon as an example, revealing why code needs to be structured in ways that may initially seem counter-intuitive or undesirable, as well as how the resources are used and allocated.

Such techniques are essential for getting almost any useful program to run in small systems, and when applied to slightly bigger machines such as the ATmega — found in platforms such as Arduino — they can allow really comprehensive programs to be executed successfully….

Panel discussion: The Future of Open Source Hardware

Interest in open source hardware continues to grow unabated and the movement has come a long way in the three years since our first meeting. However, could it ever provide opportunities on the same scale as those afforded by its much older and now well understood cousin, open source software? What are the barriers to growth? How are the intellectual property and economic considerations different to those of open source software? These are just some of the questions that we plan to explore as part of this panel discussion.

Read more.

An interview with LadyAda, Limor Fried founder of Adafruit @ Open Electronics.

Limor Fried aka Ladyada is the founder of the Adafruit Industries. Besides having been featured on Wired’s cover she is a continue inspiration for hackers and entrepreneurs worldwide. We had the chance to interview her on a quite long bunch of topics and she was so awesome to find time to answer.

Interview: Voting-Machine Hacker Tackles Your Next TSA Pat-Down @ Wired.com.

The name Ed Felten may not exactly be a household word, but if you think people should be able to jailbreak their mobile phones, then you probably owe him a debt.
For more than a decade now, Felten has promoted an important idea that has sometimes put him at odds with the music industry and big technology companies: the notion that consumers should be able to take apart and learn about the software and hardware on devices that they own.

Taking a stand on open source and patents.

At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally. And while open platforms have faced growing patent attacks, requiring companies to defensively acquire ever more patents, we remain committed to an open Internet—one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.

Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.

Read more.

Celebrate Hardware Freedom Day on April 20th 2013!

Let’s celebrate Hardware Freedom Day on 20th April 2013
Hardware Freedom Day is a yearly celebration of Open Hardware! Every year since 2004 hundreds of teams have been celebrating Software Freedom Day, often showcasing Open Hardware in the process. At the Digital Freedom Foundation (formerly known as SFI) we thought it was about time to have a special day just for Open Hardware. So get your hackerspace in order, your team up to speed and register your event right now!

Support HFD

Your organization believes hardware should be hackable and/or is deeply involved in Open Hardware. You believe that Hardware Freedom Day needs traction and are willing to help us with the promotional efforts by putting one of our web banners and countdown on your website.

Let us thank you for the help, as every contribution is important and follow that link for more details.

Organize HFD

You love to hack all the gadgets you have a chance to put your hand on and/or are a member of a hackerspace? 

The time has come to join all the other hackerspaces in the world and celebrate Hardware Freedom Day on April 20th: We have drafted a guide to get you started, simply register your event but don’t hesitate to join our mailing list and exchange ideas with others.

Attend HFD

You’ve heard about Open Hardware and would love to discover more, be able to ask questions and see some live action? You already have some hackable stuff and would like to meet with like-minded people in your neighbourhood?

Then Hardware Freedom Day is for you: check out our events map and find a location in your area celebrating HFD.

Read more.

DIY Guides – Open Sourcerer.

We created this guide to walk you step by step through using Git and Github – really useful tools in open source. At the same time, it is walking you through completing all of the challenges for the Open Sourcerer Skill!

Meet your 2013 OHS chairs!.

The OSHWA board has appointed AddieWagenknecht and Jimmie Rodgers as the 2013 Open Hardware Summit co-chairs!

Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam. A 3-day co-design jam to improve Open Source Hardware documentation practices and facilitate collaborative innovation!

On April 26-28, 2013 in New York City: a unique event during which developers, designers, and hardware hackers get together to bring Open Source Hardware to the next stage.

“The power of open source hardware lies in the ability to build upon others’ work and good documentation is the key to making this happen.” – The Jam Hosts.

Documentation best practices can increase contributions to OSHW projects significantly. A shared understanding of what documentation should look like, more powerful and cooperative software to handle it and new graphical tools could be the keys to the next revolution in product design and manufacturing. For this reason, we decided to host a collaborative event: to generate ideas and projects that could enhance the User Experience of people who are new to OSHW – whether they are individuals or businesses – and want to contribute to a shared vision and shared objectives.

Given the wide scope of the challenges, the organization team designed a first 3-day event, that will be based on a mashup of well known design and collaborative creation formats for group cooperation such as Service Design Jams (http://www.designjams.org/) and Hackathons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon). The event will be focused on identifying and sharing outstanding problems concerning the diffusion of OSHW (especially those related to documentation and technology transfer best practices), in generating creative solutions and prototyping them collaboratively.

It will be a great opportunity to learn, build relationships and start new projects. The team behind the Jam currently opened a form for people to submit their applications (apply) and is looking for several different profiles, as the challenge behind the mission of the event – improving the way OSHW is designed and documented to enhance reuse, replication, remix – is huge and implies a large set of skills.

Every organization interested in Open Source Hardware shall participate: the team is looking forward for cooperation and involvement and can be contacted at info@opensourcewarehouse.org.
See the updated list here > http://www.opensourcewarehouse.org/be-a-partner/

Adafruit is a partner and sponsoring this jam!

Help EFF Fight Patent Trolls, Support the SHIELD Act: A call to action from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

This week brings promising news in the fight against patent trolls. We have written before about how a broken patent system has led to an explosion of lawsuits by patent trolls (companies that assert patents as a business model instead of creating products). In the hands of trolls, patents become a tax on innovation.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, along with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, has re-introduced the SHIELD Act (the backronym stands for Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes) in the House of Representatives. The SHIELD Act (H.R. 845, pdf) is designed to help the innocent victims of patent trolls.

Patent trolls use the sky-high cost of litigation as a weapon. It costs millions to defend a patent lawsuit. So while a few targets—including Newegg and Twitter—have fought back and won, even large companies are understandably reluctant to spend a fortune and waste employee time fighting a lawsuit. And smaller companies, like start-ups, might not have the resources to defend a patent suit at all. So even if the troll’s claims are weak, it can pressure its victims into settlement.

The SHIELD Act will help fix this problem. Under the Act, if the patent troll loses in court (because the patent is found to be invalid or there is no infringement), then it pays the other side’s costs and legal fees. We think this proposal—which is also one of the reforms proposed at our Defend Innovation project—is a great first step.

Momentum is building for patent reform. President Obama recently acknowledged that we need new laws to deal with patent trolls. This is the perfect time to tell Congress that it needs to act.

Please join EFF in supporting the SHIELD Act by contacting Congress today.

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

The amazing InMoov project is on the front cover of the next issue of The Atlantic Magazine.  Too bad the article is about robots in general, and not about the InMoov project itself.

A few months ago I was asked by an American set designer, if I would let them use InMoov hand for to make the front cover of The Atlantic magazine.
Attribution is to be expected inside the magazine. Behing abroad, I have not the chance to buy it for to check it out.

Looking at the result, they did a good job on the finishing touch. If I remember correctly, it was printed in PLA with a 0.3mm thickness. They did a finishing coating with paint, but I would guess they had to use a primer with a good sending job.

Check out the InMoov project on Thingiverse, and print your own!

Over on the My 2uF blog, Robert shares his adventures designing and using a custom built rotary encoder.

The onboard microcontroller does the decoding, optionally some more processing, and sends byte-sized data to the main project board. The byte contains information about direction, push-button status and maybe even about average rotation speed (encoded in the higher bits). I think I will like it – if it works

…

Quick and dirty application: Volume control knob for Amarok or kmix. All you need is a 5V USB-serial adapter and a little perl script that listens for data. Oh, and linux of course. Amarok’s volume is controlled using dbus calls. Very simple to do, actually. Part of the demo code for this little project!

Learn more about the project here.

Build your own open-source Arduino powered colorimeter, complete with 3D printed enclosure and an Adafruit LCD Shield kit.

This project details an open-source colorimeter, which is made from open source electronics and 3-D printable components. This is part of a larger project to reduce the cost of scientific equipment using open-source hardware.

Colorimetric analytical methods are likely to be the most commonly applied methods for determining the concentration of dissolved species. Many dissolved species absorb light of a particular wavelength and the amount absorbed as the light passes through a given length of solution increases with increasing concentration the species; higher concentrations absorb more light than do lower concentrations. The relationship between absorption and concentration is defined by the Beer-Lambert law:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer-Lambert.

A colorimeter or a spectrophotometer is employed to measure absorption at a specific wavelength. Light is usually filtered to permit only a narrow band of light at the absorbance peak wavelength for the species measured. The apparatus typically reports results in concentration units but also reports absorbance units or transmittance.

Read more about the project here.

This new Adafruit shield makes it easy to use a 16×2 Character LCD. We really like the Blue & White 16×2 LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another pin to control the backlight for a total of 7 pins. That’s almost half of the pins available on a classic Arduino! With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a shield that lets you control a 16×2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the Arduino!

Get your own Adafruit LCD Shield Kit here.

Pulsar – Bluetooth Wireless Heart Rate Monitor.

Dear Ladyada/Adafruit folks,

As a professional hardware engineer with little time, I have been working evenings and weekends to create a Bluetooth 4.0 heart rate monitor without a chest strap – all open source hardware and design for such devices should not be proprietary or expensive.

I need help with 8051 firmware modifications of TI’s BT stack (simple changes to send data, sleep).  Simple DSP filtering for heart rate sensor data (optical sensor based on pulse oximetry) or need mechanical design help on industrial design of the enclosure.  I aim to fit this into the iPod nano 6th generation “watch” form factor so most wristbands can be used.

Would you post this opportunity to work on such a great product on your blog for all to see?  I believe all can be accomplished open source with tools such as EagleCAD, FreeCAD, etc.  I am very close but could use community help.

Thank you,
Fatih
Hardware Engineer, former customer, believer in open source hardware.

Open Source Hardware fosters a collaborative community that is breeding innovation and changing the shape of the world. This film introduces the concept of Open Source Hardware, comments on its impact and projects at what the future may hold.
For more on our contributors and sponsors please see imaginen4tion.com

OpenXC.

OpenXC is an API to your car – by installing a small hardware module to read and translate metrics from a car’s internal network, the data becomes accessible from most Android applications using the OpenXC library. You can start making vehicle-aware applications that have better interfaces based on context, can minimize distraction while driving, are integrated with other connected services, and can offer you more insight into your car’s operation.

Ford Motor Company and Bug Labs joined up to create a standard way of creating aftermarket software and hardware for vehicles. Every new car is full of computers and electronics, and there is growing interest in connecting the output from those systems to third-party applications and the web. Many companies are already offering tools to hook into the driver’s interface, but for the most part they have limited availability for hobbyists and developers. What if the system was designed from the ground up to be open source and to give insight into the vehicle itself? With proper hardware isolation to ensure you can’t “brick” your $20,000 investment in a car, OpenXC imagines when your car is as easy to program as your smartphone.

Today’s version of OpenXC runs on a combination of the Arduino and Android platforms. It uses tools you already know and opens up thousands of possibilities.

A very insightful article about the pitfalls of Non-commercial licenses (PDF).

Open Pinball Project via Dangerous Prototypes.

Open source pinball hardware and software – one group’s quest to build the perfect pinball machine, or at least a pinball machine for a reasonable price!

GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More @ NYTimes.com.

Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.

“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”

Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?

As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly. Even on a less lofty plane, companies like GitHub and Asana will ultimately test themselves against complex corporate processes lasting years, and involving skills in both science and the humanities. Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.

PLOS Computational Biology: Ten Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software.

Open-source software development has had significant impact, not only on society, but also on scientific research. Papers describing software published as open source are amongst the most widely cited publications (e.g., BLAST, and Clustal-W), suggesting many scientific studies may not have been possible without some kind of open software to collect observations, analyze data, or present results. It is surprising, therefore, that so few papers are accompanied by open software, given the benefits that this may bring.

Publication of the source code you write not only can increase your impact, but also is essential if others are to be able to reproduce your results. Reproducibility is a tenet of computational science, and critical for pipelines employed in data-driven biological research. Publishing the source for the software you created as well as input data and results allows others to better understand your methodology, and why it produces, or fails to produce, expected results. Public release might not always be possible, perhaps due to intellectual property policies at your or your collaborators’ institutes; and it is important to make sure you know the regulations that apply to you. Open licensing models can be incredibly flexible and do not always prevent commercial software release.

Simply releasing the source under an open license, however, is not sufficient if you wish your code to remain useful beyond its publication. The sustainability of software after publication is probably the biggest problem faced by researchers who develop it, and it is here that participating in open development from the outset can make the biggest impact. Grant-based funding is often exhausted shortly after new software is released, and without support, in-house maintenance of the software and the systems it depends on becomes a struggle. As a consequence, the software will cease to work or become unavailable for download fairly quickly, which may contravene archival policies stipulated by your journal or funding body. A collaborative and open project allows you to spread the resource and maintenance load to minimize these risks, and significantly contributes to the sustainability of your software.

If you have the choice, embracing an open approach to development has tremendous benefits. It allows you to build on the work of other scientists, and enables others to build on your own efforts. To make the development of open scientific software more rewarding and the experience of using software more positive, the following ten rules are intended to serve as a guide for any computational scientist.

Read more.

Great talk from fbz at the Summit of New Thinking conference about open-source hardware and open culture, and where things are heading.

Open source hardware, open source firmware and open source industrial design has seeped into our reality. Open development of products, art projects, and all physical things occur on a blindingly rapid and ever forking path. From circuits to software to housings, learn about engineering on a different plane of transparency.
In this talk you’ll hear about how the almost accidental open sourcing of one small chip, the Realtek RTL2832U, is causing huge ripples through entire disciplines. Join the ride with the blindingly fast hardware iterations of an open source hardware company, and the often hidden implications for the hardware. Be pulled into the story of strange fringe knitting machine hardware, the Brother KH930, brought back from obsolescence. Learn about weird art projects like the Orchidarium and Massage Couch that might not be so artsy and actually useful after all. Watch strange ideas become actual items in our world, and how all of this is possible primarily with open hardware.

Our Fritzing library parts make an appearance at around 6’20″ in the video!

DARPA and Defense Department look to a more open source future @ O’Reilly Radar.

As the United States military marches further into the age of networked warfare, data networks and the mobile platforms to distribute and access them will become even more important.

This fall, the (retired) eighth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described a potential future of the military that’s founded not only in open source thinking, but in next-generation user interfaces and biohacking straight out of science fiction. If even some of the strategic thinking he described at this year’s Military Open Source Conference in D.C. is applied to how the technology that supports the next generation of war fighters is built, dramatic evolutionary changes could cascade down the entire supply chain of one of the world’s biggest organizations.

The magazine’s Entrepreneur of 2012, Limor Fried, founded Adafruit Industries in 2005 and through it, is educating and inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists. The open-source hardware and electronics company not only designs a catalog full of cool tech products that clients can order–it gives away the step-by-step instructions and tutorials for them to learn how to do so themselves. Fried’s new badging system also makes learning exciting for kids, by rewarding them for mastering new tech-savvy skills, and furthers the educational mission of Adafruit Industries.

From the article…

• FAVE QUOTE: “We are what we celebrate.” —entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen
• WORDS OF WISDOM: “Be the change. If you want to live in a world that looks a certain way, don’t wait around for someone else to do it.” —business partner Phil Torrone
• REQUIRED READING: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson
• ENTREPRENEURIAL IDOL: Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, publisher of countless maker-friendly magazines and books
• BIGGEST MOTIVATOR: Feedback that Adafruit is inspiring the next generation of engineers
• DESIGN INSPIRATION: New York City

Previous profile here, and here’s a preview of the article January 2013: Feature: Entrepreneur of the Year here. And an interview “Magazine names hacker Limor Fried ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’” on CNET here.

With this award comes great expectations and responsibilities for all of us at Adafruit to keep doing a good for our community, customers and for our team. Thank you everyone for all the support.

Check out this fascinating open source and state-of-the-DIY conference in Berlin, the EHSM:

Some electronics books from the 50s claimed making triode tubes would be an impossible endeavour for amateurs. Today, there are at least two DIY laboratories making not only triodes but also all sorts of vacuum electron devices.

Three years after the first GPS satellite was launched, few people used the technology, which was perceived as very complicated and expensive. Yet, someone successfully operated his homebrew receiver made from hundreds of that time’s electronic parts.

These days, microchips are often thought to be impenetrable and impossible to manufacture without large-scale facilities. But many individuals are reverse engineering microelectronics designs, often breaking security systems based on the obscurity of the silicon layout. Some are even devising DIY methods to replicate parts of the microchip manufacturing process, with impressive results.

What are the frontiers of DIY technology? The first Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting (EHSM) will feature presentations of the brightest DIY achievements. But we do not want to stop at DIY. In fact, we should not, because teamwork is the only way to get the big things done.
The open source ethos is about keeping the freedom and openness of DIY when many people are involved. At a time when thousands of developers from hundreds of companies contribute to Linux and the world’s largest physics laboratories share openly licensed hardware designs on OHWR, we will explore the cutting-edge open source hardware and software practices.

This premiere of the EHSM will be held in Berlin on December 28-30 2012. Everyone is welcome to attend it. Curiosity is enough to qualify, and we have kept the minimal entrance fee affordable.

Read more.

Building my Own Laptop @ bunnie’s blog.

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.

This is a lengthy project. Fortunately, ARM CPUs are getting fast enough, and Moore’s Law is slowing down, so that even if it took a year or so to complete, I won’t be left with a woefully useless design. Today’s state of the art ARM CPUs — quad-core with GHz+ performance levels — is good enough for most day-to-day code development, email checking, browsing etc.

We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers.

Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs.

Read more.

Pianocade: Open Source Chiptunes Synthesizer and MIDI Controller

The Pianocade is a synthesizer designed to sound, look, and feel like vintage arcade games. It’s easy for people who want to dive right in, powerful and feature-rich for people who want to tinker, and fun to play for everyone.

With synthesis hardware based off of classic gaming systems and a 128-note range, the Pianocade lets you perform the retro sounds you want, live!

With traditional 5-pin MIDI and USB MIDI, you can use the Pianocade to control other instruments, or use external sequencers and controllers to play the Pianocade.

Check out Pinoccio, a neat new open source, wireless hardware & software platform.  Some highlights:

No cables, no cords. Pinoccio talks over wi-fi and runs on a long-lasting rechargeable LiPo battery. It’s also Arduino-compatible.

The Atmel 802.15.4 radio in the 128rfa1 chip we’re using has a ridiculously low power draw for the range you get. We can blast the radio non-stop at full power, and a 550mAh battery will power that (and the MCU) for something like 27 hours. It draws 17mA at full power radio, and the MCU in the highest power state. We wanted this sort of endurance while still remaining networkable. Thus this was the right package.

You can use the board non-stop at full power for around 27 hours. However, it’s more likely that you’ll put the board to sleep, and have it wake up when certain conditions are met. Using it this way, you could have a board run on one charge for months. This can vary a lot depending on how you’re using Pinoccio.

via Dangerous Prototypes

Tom wrote in to share his latest project, the Arduino Area Network.

Earlier this year I started to investigate how I might go about implementing the circuitry and communications between a computer and a micro controller for my long term split-flap display project which seems to have taken over my blog of late!

The setup I finally settled on was to use a simplex (single direction) serial protocol called RS-485, the ‘bigger brother’ of RS-232 used in almost every computer, commonly known as ‘the serial port‘. Using RS-485 would require some special circuitry which could convert to a signal that an Arduino could understand so I went about building a converter circuit which I had built up as a small PCB, my first proper PCB, designed by me alone, and it worked first time!

Next I worked on some software which is designed to receive six byte commands from a master control board allowing full control of all modules together or each module individually.

Check out this fantastic LED pocket watch by Frank Zhao

This is a LED pocket watch. It has 12 LEDs to show the hour, 60 LEDs to show the minute, and 60 LEDs to show the second. The LEDs are arranged in three rings. There is a button on the top to activate the pocket watch, and a button on the back to change modes and settings.

The battery is a rechargable lithium ion coin cell battery and it is charged from a micro USB connector. The battery life depends on how heavily the pocket watch is used, but if you leave it alone, it is estimated to last several months. There is a low battery indication feature. This pocket watch also feature a buzzer and a vibration motor, which are used for the alarm feature, and the motor causes a short “tick” as each second passes by. The pocket watch is constructed of a PCB, two pieces of laser cut clear acrylic plastic, and a 3D printed casing.

Head on over to Instructables to check out Frank’s build log, and get the files to make your own.  Also, don’t forget to vote for Frank’s LED pocket watch by clicking the Vote ribbon in the upper right hand corner of the Instructables page.

A Primer on Cheap Software Defined Radios by Yuval Adam.

I’ve always been fascinated by radio. I clearly remember discovering numbers stations at the age of 9 using my grandparent’s old shortwave radio, and I was fascinated by the concept of stuff being broadcast over the air – discounting FM radio which was ordinary.

Actually, I’ve always wanted to buy a frequency scanner and learn more about radio, but never got around to actually doing so, something didn’t feel right. Last week, the right thing I was waiting for was found – an open-source software stack and a $15 USB dongle turn my desktop computer into a software defined radio. Essentially, this means that anyone can, very cheaply, pull data out of thin air (literally), and analyze it using code.

Up until now, SDR could only be achieved using expensive equipment, and using proprietary drivers and software. The $15 SDR option is a serious breakthrough in making the SDR world more accessible. As with most new technologies, the open-source SDR world is still not very user-friendly, and in this post I’ll try to outline the basic stuff a beginner should know when entering this world.

Read more.

Laen has just opened up an online shop for PCBs created through the OSH Park service.  The PCBs are sold with permission from the creators.  While some of the PCBs may be on hand, it looks like many will be added to the next PCB order once you order it in the store.  This is a great idea, and I hope everyone who submits their board to OSH Park opts-in.

Learn more about the OSH Park PCB service here.

UPDATE: Looks like the store is just a place for Laen to unload extra PCBs.  For a maker marketplace, please checkout tindie.com.

(image from the Arduino MIDI tutorial)

Great piece from the BBC on the upcoming 30th anniversary of MIDI in the wild, on the influence and impact of the technology, and why being open is a good idea:

“You could play one keyboard with your right hand and another keyboard with your left hand,” says Dave Smith, a synthesiser manufacturer from California who was working on the issue back then.

“But [musicians] couldn’t play more than one at the same time because there was no way of electrically interconnecting them,” he remembers.

What Smith did next would transform the way recording studios worked, and create a revolution in music and recording production.

He persuaded manufacturers to adopt a common format which allowed their synthesisers to be controlled externally – by another keyboard potentially made by a rival manufacturer, or even by a computer.

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The first instrument with MIDI capability was a synthesiser called the Prophet-600 – designed by Dave Smith – which rolled off the production line in December 1982.

Atari and Commodore 64 computers – hugely popular among game-playing teenagers at the time – could also be used to control MIDI instruments via a cable with 5-pin connectors at either end.

The wide availability of the format and its ease of use helped redefine pop music in the 1980s – giving it a strong electronic feel and spawning many of the contemporary music genres that followed.

Alex Paterson’s co-producer Dom Beken remembers how MIDI allowed anyone to create “massive soundscapes”.

“Those electronic pioneers and those people who might have been punks before could now just make stuff that people would go mad to on the dance floor,” he says.

For Dave Smith, MIDI could only become a success if every manufacturer adopted it – “we had to give it away”, he says.

The universality of the format was perhaps an early example of what now gets called “open source” technology – MIDI’s backers intended it to be a free gift to the world which allowed anyone access.

Software & Sawdust: Birthday Badges via HaD.

“Never pass up a teachable moment.”  As a Boy Scout leader of many years, this has become one of my many mottos.  Any time you have the opportunity to grab a child’s attention and focus that attention on something more educational than the latest video game then grab it and have fun.  My son’s 6th birthday party recently became one of those moments.

Google Linear Book Scanner via HaD.

Linear Book Scanner is a prototype automatic book scanning device. The device moves a book face-down over linear sensors to capture page images, and uses vacuum pressure to turn pages automatically as the book moves.

A great video by Sam Muirhead about Fabienne Serrière and her adventures with her knitting machine.

Once upon a time, there was a warm, fuzzy hack. It was 2010 – Becky Stern and Lada Ada (Limor Fried) built on Steve Conklin’s disk emulator and knitting machine resources to allow their modern computers to work with the ancient microcontroller of a 1980s knitting machine. This meant that they could now knit designs made with modern tools, too complex or tedious to easily knit by hand. They shared their work with the world and since then, following an open hardware model, they and many others have contributed hardware and software improvements, smoothed the workflow, and allowed other models of knitting machine to be hacked. I went for a beautiful autumnal bike ride over to Wedding and caught up with Fabienne Serrière (FBZ), who has contributed a number of improvements to the original hack and has the wonderful woolens to show for it. We talked about the history of knitting machines, this hack, open hardware and Fabienne’s various projects, and started plotting to make an open source sweater to keep me warm in the winter months. We covered so many different things that I can only show you a brief introduction to her projects now, but there will be more to come!

go, fbz, go!

Good article from Zach over on the HAXLR8R blog about the hidden gotchas of hardware cost estimation:

If you’re a hardware company, you are in the business of selling things. In order to make money, you need to sell your things for more than they cost you to make. This is basic economics, but the application of this principle is anything but simple.

In this day and age of hardware startups launching on Kickstarter, or offering presales on their website, it is even more important. If you price your product too low, you run the risk of cutting your margins down so low that you don’t make enough money to survive. This death-by-success is worse than the alternative which is to over-price your product and not generate enough sales or interest to run a viable business.

When pricing your product you are walking on a knifes edge: too high and you can’t launch, too low and you risk imploding. The only surefire way to avoid this is to actually produce and pay for your product before selling a single one. For most startups, this is impossible: so you must estimate.

Read the whole thing here.

News: The Source of the Revolution – open source hardware is hacking education @ element14.

It is in education that open-source hardware and software are often most widely embraced. Whether it is using gEDA for schematic simulation, or CooCox as an IDE, there is a vast constellation of tools available for teaching. With growing forums, from Stackoverflow and GitHub to our own element14 community, the support for open-source projects has never been as great or accessible, adding another dimension to open-source development. University courses are now frequently taught using boards such as the chipKIT Uno 32™ and commonly the original Arduino Uno, allowing students to take their first steps into Microchip’s PIC32MX  or Atmel’s 8-bit ATmega328, though there is also increasing interest in teaching ARM 32-bit architectures. Affordable ARM®Cortex™- M series boards such as the Cookie, coupled with IDEs that are either free as trials from major manufacturers or completely open-source, have lowered the barrier to entry.
 
A new generation of engineers inspired by the open-source movement is already emerging and with a whole universe of open-source IDEs, debuggers, programmers and development platforms to support them we are witnessing a hardware revolution akin to what Linux achieved for operating systems. Just as Android presents the sleek face of tens of thousands of hours of combined effort worldwide and has become by far the biggest smart phone operating system, the humble beginnings of hardware projects that we see on Hack a Day and element14 may one day lead to phenomenal global advances.

Open-Source Hardware “Why it won’t happen” prediction from 2002… via Robots.net.

Open-source software has obviously captured the popular imagination. It’s both an altruistic effort at cooperation and a passive-aggressive stab at the reigning dominant players. It works well for some products, some programmers, and some companies. But open-source techniques aren’t getting traction in hardware, and they’re not likely to any time soon – Jim Turley.

And from 1999…

Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we’re allowed to do it is not vitally important. I see no social imperative for free hardware designs like the imperative for free software – Richard Stallman — On “Free Hardware”

Ben read an article about the world’s largest NES controller, and decided to make the world’s smallest.

Introducing the μJoypad, the worlds smallest NES controller! Measuring in at 25.4×12.8×3.2mm (1.0×0.5×0.1in) this is, by my best research, the worlds smallest, fully functional NES compatible controller. A couple months ago I saw an article or video of the world’s largest game controller and thought to myself “I bet I could make the smallest” and so I did.

via Hackaday

Open-source design: Mass bespoke @ The Economist.

IN WILLIAMSBURG, Brooklyn—the hippest part of New York’s hippest borough—you can pick up a seat for $750 made from the redwood reclaimed from an old water tower; or fork out $3,200 for a “Bilge” lounge chair, crafted from bourbon barrels and truck springs. Alternatively, if you are trend-conscious but cash-poor, you can download the free designs for strikingly similar items, get them cut at a local shop, and assemble them at home.

Designers are beginning to go “open source”, allowing users to download tweakable templates for everyday objects like furniture. “Ship information not stuff!” declares the website for AtFab, which is spearheading the trend along with SketchChair and MakeMe. Both AtFab and SketchChair specialise in homewares that can be put together from flat interlocking pieces of wood or acrylic. They are cut from a digital file by a laser-cutter or a computer numerical control (CNC) mill—machines which are becoming increasingly cheap and common. SketchChair also offers software that lets you draw-on components like legs, and test the physics of the chair against a manikin sized to the proportions of your body.

“The idea of a ‘factory’ is, in a word, changing,” writes Chris Anderson, a journalist and entrepreneur, in his new book, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution”. “Just as the Web democratised innovation in bits, a new class of ‘rapid prototyping’ technologies, from 3-D printers to laser cutters, is democratising innovation in atoms.” Mr Anderson is an advocate of the “maker” movement, a community that champions the digital and the do-it-yourself. He believes that mass customisation could re-energise manufacturing, create environmentally responsible jobs, and empower consumers to surround themselves with objects uniquely tailored to their needs.

Interview with Paul Berberian, CEO of Orbotix – HAXLR8R.

What is your opinion of open hardware and does it have a role in a for-profit company?
Haven’t seen it work yet and I think it is a myth. Successful hardware is designed, perfected and then mass produced – open software can be fluid and change dynamically and released and re-released without much of a cost to redeploy. In hardware once you lock into a design any change can cost a lot and require all sorts of tooling and certification changes. An open design is about rapid iteration and a pseudo crowd sourced level of participation. Who pays for the tooling, the prototypes, the certs? Who gets to choose that this is the design that will sell in the market? I’m not saying it is impossible – just haven’t seen it work.

An Open-Source Kit Of Parts, For Making Any Gadget From Scratch.

The move towards DIY digital fabrication–from MakerBot to Fab@Home–is an undoubtedly great development for consumers. But one thing it’s missing is a standard system for modeling and exchanging components. If 10 people upload a design for a replacement bolt for a chair, odds are you’ll get 10 slightly different designs. While the world has the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) devoted to regulating specifications, tolerances, and standards of consumer goods, the digital fabrication community is fractured when it comes to a universal standard.

Enter OpenStructures, a Belgian project that aims to establish a standard grid for developing and sharing models. OpenStructures is “a modular construction model, where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared geometrical grid,” the OS team explains. “It initiates a kind of collaborative Meccano [an English Erector Set--eds.] to which everybody can contribute parts, components and structures.” Simply put, OS offers a universal language for people who design and fabricate objects, ultimately leading to a cleaner, faster user experience.

Read more.

The Open Source Hardware Association will be an advocacy group, mostly educating people on what open hardware is, the benefits, and best practices, as well as being a roof for all the various items built by the community so far, including the Open Hardware Summit, the open hardware definition, and our logo.

There are a lot of excellent things done by the community that don’t really have a cohesive web presence to live under. We hope to give the community a bit of structure by organizing information around open source hardware under the Association. The other reason is that currently a lot of our knowledge about open hardware is colloquial… We hope to create a resource to make all these things more transparent and provide a formal entity that can answer questions about how, why, what, and the best practices of open hardware.

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The board of the Open Source Hardware Association currently consists of Alicia Gibb (President), Danese Cooper, Catarina Mota, Windell Oskay, Nathan Seidle, and Wendy Seltzer. We are in the process of electing more board members with public nominations, but haven’t worked out the details yet. Please stay tuned!

All donations and membership dues (beyond the cost of providing specific benefits) will be used to support the Open Source Hardware Association’s public-interest purposes. [Dues may be tax deductible as permitted by law if our tax status is granted.] Memberships are valid for one year and priced in USD. Please review the membership levels below. Not ready to become a member? You can also donate to our cause! We are designing a corporate membership for similar levels. Current membership is for individuals only.

Join if you’d like to support the OSHWA. We are excited that a group is going to represent, help and educate regarding OSHW. Most of all, they’re going to represent and celebrate open source companies like Adafruit

Want to learn more about OSHWA? Read MAKE’s Exclusive Interview with Alicia Gibb – President of the Open Source Hardware Association.

Open Source ARM userland @ Raspberry Pi.

Today we have some really big news, which is going to mean a lot to many programmers in our community who have been asking about it ever since launch. This is one of those announcements that has been in the pipeline for quite some time, but we haven’t been able to talk about it until now.

As of right now, all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM is available under a FOSS license (3-Clause BSD to be precise). The source is available from our newuserland repository on GitHub. If you’re not familiar with the status of open source drivers on ARM SoCs this announcement may not seem like such a big deal, but it does actually mean that the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way. We at the Raspberry Pi Foundation hope to see others follow.

Everything running on the ARM on the Raspberry Pi is now open source.

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