Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Open Hardware Projects

The concept of open hardware is not as mature or well-defined as open software, but that hasn't stopped the development of some very interesting embedded systems. Some are inexpensive designs for the hobbyist that resemble electronic kits like the Arduino. Other are very polished and expensive consumer electronics like Chumby, with a 1GHz Marvell PXA168 processor and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. Another is Bug Labs ARM11 based BUGbase with swappable BUGmodules available for a variety of applications. Of course, with open hardware you can build your own module too. BUGsound Module Make magazine has a huge list of open hardware projects. The one thing they have in common is free access to the schematics and layout and should use only open source software, so you are free to build the entire design yourself.

1 comment:

Paras said...

Now all we need is a home three axis printing machine so you can download open source hardware plans and print your own electronics. Dash made a really cool GPS unit that they stopped selling in the US that had open source software and the users created applications to fetch weather reports (it has a cellular link) and users can map out speed traps and update other Dash users in near real time.