What’s clear is that over the last few years, many of the highest profile open source projects have chosen the Apache license, including “cloud computing” platforms such as Hadoop, OpenStack, Cassandra, and CloudFoundry. Node.js, another of-the-moment cloud platform, uses the MIT License. And even the big-name mobile platforms have joined the crowd. Google’s Android mobile OS used the Apache license, and just this week, HP announced its schedule for open sourcing Palm’s webOS platform under the Apache.
It’s no coincidence that many of these projects grew out of the big web companies. “They have a very different attitude towards open source than we’ve seen in the past,” says Steven O’Grady. “They don’t value code in the same way. These companies are taking code that would have been proprietary five or six years ago — that would have been seen as differentiating code — and just releasing it. They don’t necessarily want or need the protections of a restrictive license.”
Interesting article. We’ve heard the idea of an Apache hardware license tossed around over the years – And here’s an article about a version of the Apache License version 2.0, amended by lawyer Andrew Katz to render it more appropriate for hardware use. This will be an interesting debate for the license geeks out there.
It SXSW season – Adafruit was a presenter at SXSW and later keynoted the conference way back before open source hardware was a familiar term, it was a great way to spread the idea of sharing hardware to a big audience. It was also where Ladyada and Phil met (and did their first project, a bluetooth controlled Roomba, frogger bot). Here’s a post about that on the SXSW site. SXSW Stories 2012: The Ability to Change the World @ sxsw.com. Glenn Thomas writes -
“One of my favorite memories from SXSWi comes from 2006 when Sixth Street hosted a game of Roomba Frogger (immortalized by Daniel Terdiman on CNet.) A prank dreamed up from the real life meeting of Phil Torrone and Limor Fried at SXSWi, this coupling eventually blossomed into the global open source hardware powerhouse Adafruit. The feeling I always get in Austin in March is that everybody around you wants to do things and make things that are new and exciting using technology. It’s a place and moment every year where the people around you have the talent, the desire, and the ability to change the world.
littleBits is a system of modular electronics that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play. The littleBits starter kit is the first kit by littleBits and contains all you need to get started within seconds. Each bit has a simple, unique function (light, sound, sensors, etc), and modules snap to make larger circuits. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists, makers and children. Included in the kit are 10 color coded modules (power, input, output, and wire) that snap together magnetically to create larger circuits, guaranteed to keep kids (or you) occupied for hours. Comes packaged in an attractive case with a magnetic closure and includes an instruction sheet, 9v battery and a custom plastic screwdriver.
littleBits starter kit contents:
A quick-start instruction set
A custom-made 9V battery
A 9V battery connector
Custom plastic screwdriver
10 littleBits:
power
button
dimmer
pressure sensor
pulse
LED
RGB LED
vibration motor
bargraph
wire
Features:
Snap and play, magnets prevent you from putting things the wrong way.
Play with light, sound, sensing and buttons without wiring, soldering or programming.
Make your own interactive objects, or combine with other construction toys.
Explain to your children the complex notions of electricity, electronics and science in a fun way!
I happened to be digging through Google searches a couple weeks back, and I stumbled upon an amazing looking hack of the Coobro Geo. A regular here at Adafruit, Stephanie, has done some nice work with a custom Chronodot library, and other hacks of Adafruit products. Using the open source schematic of the Coobro Geo, Stephanie managed to strap on an Adafruit OLED, and a lipo battery she had laying around to create her own GPS tracking device. Here is how Stephanie describes it:
In a nutshell – I was thinking of making an arduino/gps device to help me track walks. I wanted to know the time and distance I was walking. When I saw your Coobro Geo project I realized that would be a perfect platform to build on.
For the LEDs, I’m using them to indicate the GPS accuracy – if there’s no signal or it’s too poor to use, the three LEDs flash. As the signal gets better, it goes to two, then one, then if the signal is excellent, none of the LEDs blink. The OLED screen displays some basic stuff on the top, like lat, long, UTC time. The push-button toggles the ‘track’ mode, so once it’s on and has a fix, one push starts it tracking – so it starts counting time, and every 10 seconds it checks how far it’s travelled. This info is displayed on the lower half of the screen. A second push of the button stops the tracking, so you can see the total distance covered, the time, and the calculated average speed. And finally, a long-push of the button clears the data.
I haven’t finished working on it yet, I was also planning on having it save the readings to the EEPROM, like every 10 seconds (or once a minute or whatever) I’d have it save the lat lon and utc stamp. Then I could dump that info at home and play it back over a map or something.
I am using a LiPo for power, I had one I’d pulled out of a dead handheld gaming device which was almost exactly the same size as the Coobro PCB. I added a JST connector so I can just unplug the battery and plug it in to a charger when I need to top it up.
I left off one of the distance LEDs because I wanted to keep the I2C pins available “just in case” and left the other LED off because… it had to be symmetrical! hehe. To connect the OLED I used several of the directional LED pins, but I did wire three of the direction LEDs up – they’re just hidden beneath the screen. The screen is held on by the wires that I used to connect it, most of which are on the left-hand side. On the right hand side there’s two wires that are not used, other than to hold the screen down. So if I needed to access the uC for any reason, I only have to desolder two wires and the OLED will fold away to one side.
Finally, I wired the power switch for ‘always on’ and replaced the jumper with the power switch, so switching it to ‘battery’ turns it on and switching it to the ‘ftdi’ side turns it off (unless you have the ftdi plugged in of course). The downside is that this means the GPS does not get that backup power to keep its settings. But I realized it would lose that every time I unplugged the battery to recharge it, so I figured it wouldn’t matter if it had to coldstart each time. It only takes about 2 minutes to get a lock and solid signal even indoors.
I totally love that gps module by the way. It’s my first experience working with a gps and it blows me away how sensitive it is. I found it was ‘too talkative’ though so I figured out how to send it the NMEA control info to have it only send the two sentences I required.
Cheers!
-Stephanie
p.s. Just remembered I had to modify the tinygps library. For ‘signal quality’ I am actualy using HDOP (horizontal degree of precision) but the tinygps library was ignoring that value. It’s a bit of an arbitrary thing, but the lower-the-better and I figured i’d want to know if it was accurately tracking my walk or not. I’ve included my modified library as well as the sketch… I also increased the buffer in the new soft serial library, as I found it was having trouble keeping up with the gps.
When researchers at the University of Washington created a new version of Raven, their robotic surgical assistant, they allowed the bots to work with open-source code and sent out Raven IIs to research labs around the country. Here’s what happened…
Open EVSE is a Open Source Hardware/Software for charging an Electric Vehicle using the standard J1772 protocol. J1772 is used in the latest generation of EVs such as the Nissan Leaf, Plug in Prius and the Chevy Volt.
This is an account, illustrated with photos, of us (Andrew Smith, Tiago Moreira, John Selmys and Kubilay Dagdelen) building the toaster. I’ll try to keep it up to date as well as time allows. On the 13th of December 2006 me, John Selmys and Tiago Moreira got together at the school to start the real work. Our task was to move the cabinet we were given by the School of Computer Studies into the Linux Club and make it smaller.
When I started my latest project, a small electric die, I knew several things: I wanted the project to be released as Open Source Hardware, I might want to sell it someday, and I didn’t want to just make an Arduino-compatible board and use the internal pseudorandom number generator. Instead, I was going to implement a random number generator in hardware!
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any experience in hardware random number generation, so I started looking around the Internet, where I found the miniRNG project by Leon Maurer. I learned a lot from his very detailed documentation but this was my first experience in the field, and I didn’t have the money to keep reworking faulty prototypes. I wanted to implement a known working random generator in my design, and his seemed perfect.
However, when I got to his licensing section, I was saddened. He was using Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike/Noncommercial. I wouldn’t just steal his design and strip out the noncommercial section, but with that section in place, I couldn’t release my project as Open Source Hardware or sell it to anyone.
Just below that section, though, was a ray of hope. I saw a link to ladyada.net captioned “I first learned of microcontrollers by reading about her mp3 player design. That got the ball rolling on my mRNG project.” Sensing a kindred soul, I emailed him, explained my intentions, and asked his permission to use a part of his design. Within a day, he emailed back saying that not only did I have his permission, he would go onto the website and change the license to remove the noncommercial requirement so that others could do the same if they wanted. Awesome!
I went to work, implementing a slightly modified version of his random number generator and borrowing some of the concepts from his source code, but putting it in a new, tiny design that could roll up to six different sizes of dice and show the result on a two-digit seven-segment LED display. I made something new and (in my opinion) cool, but was able to build off of an existing design to do it, which was an immense help during the debugging phase. Since this was only my second time using raw Embedded C, it was nice to not have to worry about the hardware too much.
I have enough problems as it is!
To me, this is a perfect example of how well the community can work. Out of this process, I built a cool new project, learned about hardware random number generators, and honed my skills in Embedded C. Instead of having to make it appear that I did the entire design, ripping off Leon’s hard work, all I had to do was ask him for permission. Now that the project is done, I’ve open sourced the whole thing, giving Leon plenty of attribution, and housed it on my github page. Leon, if you’re out there reading this, you’re awesome. Thank you for everything, I couldn’t have done it without you.
NEW PRODUCT – Open source Upgrade stickers! You hacked, modded or made something BETTER with Open source! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting stickers to celebrate achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share. Designed by Tyler Cooper from Coobro, a great open-source hardware company!
The greatest part of making, sharing and selling open source hardware is what happens after it gets out in the world We are constantly surprised by the things people do with open-source products and projects. Makers email pictures of hardware hacks, and post code that takes devices in directions we had never dreamed of or thought possible. We know are not alone in this, and have a strong feeling that anyone who has released open source hardware has spent time digging through web searches and forums looking for projects that have used their hardware in unique ways. We want to celebrate these open source hardware hacks and upgrades. Anytime someone modifies a piece of open source hardware and adds to either the code, or the hardware, we will attach one of these badges of honor to the maker (and project!).
2 stickers, each about 2″ x 2″ (50mm x 50mm). Artwork can be downloaded here.
Ayah Bdeir is the founder and lead engineer of littleBits, an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play. littleBits won Popular Science’s “Best of Toy Fair 2012″ and Ayah was named a TED Fellow this year. I interviewed her this morning at TED2012 in Long Beach, CA.
A little over a year ago, I started playing around with the newly available AVR ATTiny4313. It’s a neat little chip, and you can have a lot of fun with it. However, I soon got tired of wiring up programming headers, power supplies and all the other stuff you need to get up and running. I also grew wary of all this support circuitry taking up significant breadboard real estate.
To eliminate all that hassle, I created the BB313. It’s got all the stuff you need (programming header, regulated 5V power, etc.) wrapped up in a nice little package, and it plugs in on the edge of the breadboard so you have lots of space for other stuff. I also added an 6-pin connector for an FTDI cable or adapter.
I originally designed it for myself, but I figured other people might like it too, so I’m releasing it open-source CC-BY-SA 3.0) so you can make your own.
The heart of the system is Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko, which has always been open and opensource. The Open Web Device is also using a Linux Kernel (the same one used by Android devices) which is also open. This is a 100% open project where, for instance, operators and OEMs can actively and openly contribute to the code, instead of Mozilla developing internally and making code drops available.
Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper. According to an editorial in Nature, this hinders reproducibility, a fundamental principle of the scientific method.
Although I trained as a designer, my work is always based on cultural anthropology. Any disruptive business model innovation has to be based on enduring, seismic changes in how people behave. You can find patterns in everything from economic statistics to seemingly benign sentiments on greeting cards. Don’t laugh–Hallmark captures the zeitgeist pretty darn fast.
The BIG BIG change I am watching now could be called many things, and contemporary thinkers I respect are coining various handles:
Indie capitalism (Bruce Nussbaum)
The Democratization of the Garage (Chris Anderson)
As with its data center and server creations, Facebook intends to “open source” its storage designs, sharing them with anyone who wants them. The effort is part of the company’s Open Compute Project, which seeks to further reduce the cost and power consumption of data center hardware by facilitating collaboration across the industry. As more companies contribute to the project, the thinking goes, the designs will improve, and as more outfits actually use the designs, prices will drop even more….
…But some big-name outfits — including some outside the web game — are already buying Open Compute servers. No less a name than Apple has taken interest in Facebook’s energy-conscious data-center design. And according to Frankovsky, fifty percent of the contributions to the project’s open source designs now come from outside Facebook.
Facebook will release its new storage designs in early May at the next Open Compute Summit, a mini-conference where project members congregate to discuss this experiment in open source hardware. Such names as Intel, Dell, Netflix, Rackspace, Japanese tech giant NTT Data, and motherboard maker Asus are members, and this past fall, at the last summit, Facebook announced the creation of a not-for-profit foundation around the project, vowing to cede control to the community at large.
Printable catalog (PDF)
FEED
