Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Best Practices for Open Source Hardware in 2014 – Windell Oskay”.
So how many of you use open source hardware, how many of you released your own open source hardware? How many of you would like to excellent so uh? Let me just give the basics first of all, and the basic question is what is open source hardware. Um, open source hardware is hardware where the design is made publicly available so that anyone can study from it, learn from it, modify it, distribute it make it, sell it and to also make and sell and design and learn from things based on derivatives of that design And this is sort of the excerpt of the preamble to the formal, open source hardware definition which you can find at oshawa.org. Also in basics. Question is why well open source hardware is a great thing for a lot of reasons. It’S not for everybody, it’s not for every application, but for a lot of things, it’s great. It gives people the freedom to control, modify and improve their own technology.
You have a thing you can have access to the design, so you can hack it and modify and improve it. It encourages commerce by letting people work together to build new things. It can reduce engineering time by giving people a head start on designing and building things. It can reduce obsolescence and waste by letting people repair and repurpose and reuse their things and frequently it allows people to cross political and economic barriers to make and distribute things in places where you can’t get them or to communities who can’t afford to get the commercial Version of the thing, and perhaps most importantly, it helps communities work together to make better things. So here’s a few great examples of open source hardware projects. Of course we have the lovely arduino um, but it’s not just gadgety things that people are doing. There are beehives, there is tableware, there is furniture, there is satellites, there are laser cutters, there are scientific instruments, there are now laptops and desktop computers. There are 3d metal printers, there are houses, there are cars, there are art robots, there are prosthetics, there are cooking machines, there are looms and uh vehicles and um, and now we’re even having big names like intel playing in open source hardware. This is really exciting.
So how does ashwa fit into this ashwa is the open source hardware association founded in 2012 to help facilitate open source hardware, primarily through education, teaching people about open source hardware and best practices for open source hardware. You are here also to facilitate the community working together to use open source hardware and to run the annual open hardware summit at the oshawa webpage. You can find a document we’ve been working on over the last year, which summarizes best practices for open source hardware. This document goes over it sort of expands upon the definition saying how to actually do some of the things that they say in the definition of what open source hardware is, but also best practices as in what you should do, not just what you have to do. Um, so let’s talk about those shoulds and we’ll divide this into some musts and some maze open source hardware must provide publicly accessible design files in the original source format. So if you’re using solidworks, you have to include your original solidworks files, if you’re using eagle you’ll include the original eagle files, if you are designing in illustrator, you’ll include the original illustrator files, but you may also want to use other formats, but those are going to Be auxiliary stuff that comes besides, what’s required.
Open source hardware must allow anyone to study, make distribute and sell, not just the design itself, but hardware made from the design and derivatives of it. Open source hardware must clearly specify which parts of a design, if not the whole thing, are released as open source. Hardware. Open source hardware must not imply that derivatives are made by the original designer or that uh and open source hardware.
If you’re using someone else’s open source already, you can’t use the trademarks of the person who released that design in the first place, i’m going to come back to the first three points in quite a bit more detail: the maze open source hardware may its option, use The open source hardware mark to label things that are compliant open source hardware may require that you attribute the design that your hardware is based upon and you may require that your derived works will carry a different name or version number from the original and open source. Hardware may be copied directly or you may make derivatives from it so about that first, must the publicly accessible design files so again, if you’re, starting with like a cad file, then you need to provide those original files in their native file formats um. Now, not everything comes from cad. What, if you have um a hand-drawn blueprint, then your scan of that is going to be considered the original in this case, you also, though, need to include additional drawings, specifications and callouts that are necessary to build a thing.
For example, if you’re doing mechanical cad, you may have a part file that doesn’t actually specify everything about it. It’S going to be a mechanical, drawing as well that calls out what the surface finish is going to be and what material it’s made of. You need to include a bill of materials says: what’s in your kit, in your parts and if you’re making something that relies on software for its operation, you also need to include that software or that firmware under an open source, license um, there’s a couple things that Are not allowed, so you can’t substitute what we call compiled. Outputs for the original design files and compiled outputs are things like gerber files from a pcb making program or igs or stl files from a cad program or pdfs from illustrator or jpegs from photoshop? Those are derived things, those are awesome and if you can’t include those that makes it so other people can use it and that’s great, but it’s not the original, and it’s also not allowed to make a future promise.
We’Ll eventually give you the source code, you can’t call it open source until it’s actually open source, the best practice for the musts here to use free and open source design tools when possible to use easily obtained off-the-shelf components and standard materials. These are not required, but they’re very helpful. One of the nice things you can do is include things like jpeg outputs of your files, because then people can take them and they can put them into github and do a diff on them.
You can do visual diffs in 2d and 3d. Now, if you have a cad file, whether it’s a circuit board or a chunk of metal, you can take two of them. Compare them directly and see what their differences are on. The allowing anyone to study make modify, distribute, etc. Best practice is to use the open source hardware logo.
So people know it’s open use. A a formal, open source hardware license some of the popular ones. Are creative commons cc buy or cc by sa tapper, or cern open hardware licenses mit license or a public domain declaration? What is not allowed to substitute is a non-commercial license, and a lot of people have done this, but it actually turns out that non-commercial clauses are not compliant with either the definition of open source hardware or the definition of open source software. A great example of number three, which is to specify which parts of a design are open source is given by a little bit.
They have on their site a page that says: hey. Look. Our circuit boards have the open source hardware logo. These are open source designs.
Here’S where you can download them, but our logos, our trademarks, our connectors are proprietary and those are ours. So that brings us to another point which is best practice. Is it’s not helpful to the community to hold a grudge against those parts of the design they’re not released? We should celebrate what parts of a design are released to the community as open source hardware. This builds the community holding a grudge against people who don’t release everything, doesn’t get us anywhere um. Finally, open source hardware projects can be copied directly or have derivatives created from them when you’re using an existing open source hardware. Design best practice is to improve the design and re-release your changes, and this is sort of like going camping.
You want to leave the forest better than you found it. Let’S help build this community and when you’re releasing open source server designs. Best practice is number one make sure you are emotionally prepared to let your project out in the world where it will be analyzed, dissected, copied, sold, modified, etc and then tell the world about it.
Great way to do that is bring it to the open hardware summit. This year summit is um september 30th october 1 in rome. Wouldn’T that be a nice place to visit and culprit papers is open through the end of the month.
Thank you very much. .