OSHWA

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Applications Open: Ada Lovelace Fellowships For 2018 Open Hardware Summit

April 7, 2018 by 2 Comments

The Open Source Hardware Association is now accepting applications for the Ada Lovelace fellowship which provides free admission to the Open Hardware Summit and a $500 travel stipend. One of OSHWA’s goals is to foster a more diverse community within open source. As part of this, Ada Lovelace Fellowships are open to women, LGBTA+, and people of color. There are a total of 10 fellowships available and applications are due by April 30th. The Open Hardware Summit will be held on September 27th at MIT.

The fellowship program, founded by Addie Wagenknecht and Alicia Gibb in 2013, builds on the ideal that Open Hardware is one way to reduce the barriers associated in access to technology. Removing some of the financial barriers associated with attending the Summit will help to ensure more people of diverse backgrounds are involved in shaping the Open Hardware world. In addition to the talks shared at the gathering, over the last several year OSWHA has been evolving the Open Hardware definition and an Open Hardware certification.

Disclaimer: [Christopher Wang] is a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association

Hackaday’s Open Hardware Summit Experience

October 12, 2017 by 6 Comments

Last week was the Open Hardware Summit in Denver Colorado. This yearly gathering brings together the people and businesses that hold Open Hardware as an ideal to encourage, grow, and live by. There was a night-before party, the summit itself which is a day full of talks, and this year a tour of a couple very familiar open hardware companies in the area.

I thought this year’s conference was quite delightful and am happy to share with you some of the highlights.

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Open Hardware Summit This Thursday

October 4, 2017 by 9 Comments

This Thursday, Hackaday and Tindie are going to be rolling into Denver to attend the 2017 Open Hardware Summit.

What’s the big draw for the Open Hardware Summit? The attendees, of course. These are the people who make all the cool bits and bobs in Open Hardware. [Prusa] will be there, Seeed will be there, OSH Park and OSH Stencils will be there (yeah, they’re different companies), BeagleBoard will be there, and Great Scott Gadgets will be there. This is the place you want to be if you want to meet the heroes of Open Hardware.

Of special interest at the Open Hardware Summit this year will be the state of certification talk. Last year, a certification process for Open Hardware was started. If you’re not aware, this is a nearly intractable problem. Copyright covers design files, not implementation, and design patents only cover ornamental fluff on the stuff that actually makes things go. Creating a certification for Open Hardware is exponentially harder than arguing over an Open Source license, and we’re excited to see how the first year of the Open Hardware Certification went.

If you’re going and hanging around in Denver until Friday, there’s a road trip being planned by Sparkfun to visit the awesome companies along the Front Range. The itinerary includes a trip to Sparkfun, lunch at a brewery, and a trip to Lulzbot. Basically, Sparkfun rented a bus. The deadline to RSVP passed long ago, but I’m renting a van for the Hackaday and Tindie crew, and I’m sure there’s going to be some overflow. After the event on Thursday, there will be a Women Who Hack Dinner and Drinks. Hackaday’s evil overlords are graciously providing the drinks and appetizer there.

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Hackaday Links: October 1, 2017

October 1, 2017 by 37 Comments

Remember when you first saw a USB port in a standard wall outlet? It was a really great idea at the time, but how’s that 500mA charge holding up now? Fresh from a random press release, here’s a USB 3.0 wall outlet, with USB A and C ports. 5A @ 5V. Future proof for at least several years, I guess.

This is what you call ‘pucker factor’. An Air France A380 traveling from CDG to LAX suffered an uncontained engine failure somewhere over Greenland. Everyone on board is fine, except for the fact they had to spend the night in Goose Bay, Canada. Want the best Twitter/YouTube account of being a passenger? Here you go. Want to know why it landed in Goose Bay? This video is about ETOPS which really doesn’t apply in this instance but it’s a sufficient introduction to diverting airplanes after engine failures.

There are mysterious pylons going up alongside bridges and tunnels in NYC (auto-playing video). No one knows what they are, and the transportation board for New York is hiding behind a cloud of secrecy. We do know there are ‘fiber optics necessary for Homeland Security items’ inside, so place your bets. It’s facial recognition, or at the very least license plate readers. You know, exactly what New York and dozens of other cities have been doing for years.

Did somebody lose a balloon? A Raspberry Pi high-altitude balloon was found on the beach in south-west Denmark.

[Peter] is building an ultralight in his basement. We’ve covered the first part of the build, and we’ve been keeping tabs on him with semi-weekly updates. Now he’s fiberglassed the fuselage and started construction of the wings. Updates of note this week: he’s found a shop with an 8-foot CNC hot wire cutter for the wings. That really cuts down on the build time and it’s actually pretty cheap. One interesting part of this build is a ‘landing gear ejection system’, or a spring thing that allows the landing gear to fall away with the tug of a wire. Why would anyone want a landing gear ejection system? In case he needs to land in a soybean field. A flat bottom means a smoother and more survivable landing. If anyone is still concerned about [Peter]’s safety, this is a put up or shut up situation. Pitch in ten bucks for a parachute if you’re so concerned.

Hoverbike Kalashnikov! What? It’s a guy’s name. No big deal.

Open Hardware Summit is this week in Denver. What will be the highlights of the event? Well, last year, OSHWA announced the creation of an Open Hardware license. This is an all-encompassing license for Open Source Hardware that’s trying to solve some very, very hard problems. Copyright doesn’t work with hardware (except for boat hulls) like it does with software, and this Open Hardware license is the best we’ve got going for us. We’re going to get an update on how well this license is propagating. Also on deck for Summit attendees is a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot. Want to see the world’s second largest 3D printer bot farm? It’ll be awesome.

Certification For Open Source Hardware Announced

October 7, 2016 by 70 Comments

Today at the Open Hardware Summit in Portland, Alicia Gibb and Michael Weinberg of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) launched the Open Source Hardware Certification program. It’s live, and you can certify your own hardware as Open Hardware right now.

What Is Open Source Hardware?

Open Source Hardware can’t be defined without first discussing open source software. At its very core, open source software is just a copyright hack, enabled by a worldwide universal computer network. The rise of open source software is tied to the increasing ease of distributing said software, either through BBSes, Usenet, and the web. Likewise, Open Source Hardware is tied to the ease of distributing, modifying, and building hardware.

In the 1980s, there were no services that could deliver a custom circuit board to anywhere on the planet for a dollar per square inch. When open software began, CNC machines were expensive tools, now you can build a very good machine for just a week’s wages. We are currently living at the dawn of Open Source Hardware, enabled by the creation of Open Source design tools that have themselves been used to create physical tools. Inexpensive 3D printers, open source oscilloscopes, circuit board plotters, and the entire hackerspace movement are as revolutionary as the Internet. These devices and the Internet are the foundations for Open Hardware and software, respectively.  The objections to why hardware is incompatible with Open Source no longer apply and small-scale manufacturing techniques are only going to get better.

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Hackaday Links: September 11, 2016

September 11, 2016 by 13 Comments

You know about the Hackaday Superconference, right? It’s the greatest hardware con ever, and it’s happening on November 5+6. Details incoming shortly.

The Hackaday Retro Edition exists. It’s the Hackaday blog, HTML-1-izized for weird and old computers? Why did I do this? Because Google is the quickest page to load on a Powerbook 180. There’s a new Retro Success, this time coming from @LeSpocky and his Nokia 3109c phone from 2008.

This is your official notice. The Open Hardware Summit is less than a month away. It’s going down in Portland, OR. Why Portland? The Ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅscene, of course. Hackaday, Tindie, and the rest of the crew will be out in Portland next month getting the latest news on the state of Open Hardware. We won’t be sitting in church pews this year, but then again there is no lady made out of soap.

Speaking of OHS, [Dave] just solved all their problems. The ‘problem’ with Open Hardware, if you can call it that, is that people use it as a bullet point on a sales deck. That neat gear logo can be marketing wank, without any of the sources, schematics, or anything else that makes a project Open Hardware. Last year, OSHWA announced they would be creating a certification process, with a trademarked logo, so they can sue people who don’t post schematics and mechanical designs (slightly inaccurate, but that’s the jist of the program). [Dave] is suggesting keeping the cool gear logo, but adding letters the teeth of the gear to designate what makes something Open Hardware. Add an S for schematic, add a B for a BOM, sort of like the creative commons logo/license. Is it a good idea? If OSHWA keeps using the gear logo for the ‘official’ Open Hardware logo/designation, there’s no recourse for when people misuse it. I’m of several minds.

[Colin Furze] is famous for his zany builds. His latest Youtube is anything but. It’s a shed. Of course, it’s the entry for his underground bunker, but this is a quality shed with a concrete pad, a few bits to keep it off the ground, and insulation. The roof is slate (because why not?), but if your design decisions are based on the phrase, ‘you only live once,’ copper may be a better choice.

The ESP32 has been released. The ESP32 is the follow-on to the very popular ESP8266. The ’32 features WiFi and Bluetooth, dual core processors, and a few undisclosed things that will make it very interesting. You can buy ESP32 modules right now, but no one has them on their workbench quite yet. To get you started when they finally arrive, [Adam] created an ESP32 KiCad Library for the ESP32 chip, and the ESP32-WROOM and ESP3212 modules.

Stallman’s One Mistake

January 13, 2016 by 147 Comments

We all owe [Richard Stallman] a large debt for his contributions to computing. With a career that began in MIT’s AI lab, [Stallman] was there for the creation of some of the most cutting edge technology of the time. He was there for some of the earliest Lisp machines, the birth of the Internet, and was a necessary contributor for Emacs, GCC, and was foundational in the creation of GPL, the license that made a toy OS from a Finnish CS student the most popular operating system on the planet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without [Stallman], open source software wouldn’t exist.

Linux, Apache, PHP, Blender, Wikipedia and MySQL simply wouldn’t exist without open and permissive licenses, and we are all richer for [Stallman]’s insight that software should be free. Hardware, on the other hand, isn’t. Perhaps it was just a function of the time [Stallman] fomented his views, but until very recently open hardware has been a kludge of different licenses for different aspects of the design. Even in the most open devices, firmware uses GPLv3, hardware documentation uses the CERN license, and Creative Commons is sprinkled about various assets.

If [Stallman] made one mistake, it was his inability to anticipate everything would happen in hardware eventually. The first battle on this front was the Tivoization of hardware a decade ago, leading to the creation of GPLv3. Still, this license does not cover hardware, leading to an interesting thought experiment: what would it take to build a completely open source computer? Is it even possible?

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