OpenFest 2013 Open Source Hardware (OSHW) made in Bulgaria

Open Source Hardware Made in Bulgaria

OpenFest 2013


$ whoami
OLIMEX Ltd – 22+ years of experience with
Hardware and Electronic Design
600+ products, half of them with OSHW license


WHAT IS OSHW?
Open source hardware is hardware whose design
is made publicly available so that anyone can study,
modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or
hardware based on that design.


Motivation to do OSHW:
- to build better products;
Presenting your design to others lets you get
more feedback about your work. Many people
can look, discuss, and suggest improvements


“By going public, we can find experts to solve
problems we cannot,” said Javier Serrano, an
accelerator engineer at CERN.


- open-source products allow original designers
and manufacturers to benefit from their
customers’ enthusiasm and effectively get cheap
design work, testing and consultation for free.


- share knowledge, educate community. There is
educational value in seeing how a design really
works. Open-source design makes people more
aware and appreciative of how things work,
which is good for society.


- acceleration of the knowledge
„Standing on the shoulders of giants“


- you have not only customers, but also
collaborators


- allow casual People to innovate - not to wait
tech companies to create something new

- all else being equal, having access to the
source documents only gives the user more
options. Your product will have better value in the
customer's eye. People like knowing how things
work and how some designer chose to do
something


- making a product open-source puts pressure
on the price to be low: if someone starts
charging too much for it, others can step in and
make it available cheaper.

- open-source products give users confidence
that a design will be available even if the original
manufacturer stopped production. Customers
counting on continued availability aren’t as
hindered as if the product is closed-source.


- open-source products enable more
customization and therefore use of a design. If
the design were public, you might find someone
that can do the modification for you for less.


Differences between OSHW / FOSS:
- Software can be made with time. Hardware
needs time and money ;)

- compatibility of design tools, unlike editing
source code in the software world. Different CAD
products, some cost $$$ money, expect fewer
contributions to the development of hardware
designs, compared to those using them.

- OSHW route: build something; put up a lot of
money to build a few; if people like it, scale it up;
raise money, know that you might lose all that
money; think about covering your potential
losses; start a company, maybe get lucky or
maybe not. Setting up a company takes an
infrastructure investment, and Paypal transaction
costs.So the initial cost of the project may be
prohibitive for the little guys.

- Prototype Costs - building hardware takes
revisions. Early revisions usually have things
wrong. In the FOSS software world, you just fix
the code, hit compile again, and the only thing it
really "costs" is your time finding and fixing the
error. In the OSHW hardware world, errors mean
broken, junk PCB's that cost money to make.
And that means wasted money, so be ready for
2, 4, or 6 revisions of hardware before it works!

- The Quantity Doom - PCB production and
components costs depend on volumes. In the
DIY OSHW world, if you are building 1's to 10's
to 25's at a time, you can't build them at a
competitive cost. This also has the side effect
that once you build your product, people who
use a small quantity of it will prefer to buy from
you instead building it themself.


- If the product is popular enough, others will
want to produce it without contributing to the
design, and they might be better at
manufacturing than the original designer.

OK! Is OSHW after all business friendly?
OLIMEX is releasing exclusively OSHW designs
for the last 5 years and suprisingly in times of
financial crisis and world-wide economy slow
down our company sales rise every year. Why?
Because of OSHW we release better, better
documented, more useful for the end customer
products!

OLinuXino OSHW Linux Computer evolution:
- iMX233 454Mhz, 64MB 05' 2012
- A13 1GHz, 512MB, VGA, 07' 2012
- A10S 1GHz, 512MB HDMI, ETH, 11' 2012
- AM3352 1GHz, 512MB, 11' 2013
- A20 2x1GHz, 1GB, HDMI, ETH,SATA, 05' 2013
- RK3188 4x1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 11' 2013
- A80 8x2Ghz, LittleBig,Octa Core, 05' 2014


...duino OSHW physical computing platforms:
- OLIMEXINO-328, 32U4, T32U4, 85, NANO
- STM32-MAPLE
- PIC32-PINGUINO
- MSP430-ENERGIA

UEXT universal extension connector:
- sensors for magnetometery, temperature,
acceleration
- IR, RS232, RS485
- RELAYS, LCD displays
- Zigbee, WIFI, Bluetooth, BLE, 2.4GHz,
868Mhz, 915Mhz

OpenFest 2013 Open Source Hardware (OSHW) made in Bulgaria

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OpenFest 2013 Open Source Hardware (OSHW) made in Bulgaria