The Bug platform is rather expensive and you have a point regarding third parties making cheaper clones. However, I that believe that with open hardware, just as with F/OSS, there is an opportunity to leverage the ‘because effect’, and to make money *because* hardware exists rather than just simply from its sale. Gain market share by striving to offer best service, to be most knowledgeable and to offer the latest innovation etc, as well as working on manufacturing costs. And again, as with F/OSS, work to create a community, to position your solution as a platform and thus to foster an ecosystem, thereby sharing development costs and leading to sustainability. Look at Arduino for example. There are third party, licensed versions bearing the name and many clones, with the originators seemingly doing fine out of it all.

Definitely agree on some of those points:

Power consumption is often an important consideration and modularisation can sacrifice efficiency in some cases, I guess the question is how far does one take the modularisation. Simularly in Opensource software modularisation can have efficiency disadvantages (code size/optimisation etc..) but it does help enable more rapid development and more co-operative innovation. It can also reduce reinvention overheads, lowering overall developments costs, and often increases reliability. Some of these other benefits can cross into the opensource hardware space, but like all changes there are pros and cons. There can also be indirect benefits such as knowledge transfer of efficiencies that perhaps a newbie would not be able to implement on their own, this could result in a lower power solution for example, so it’s not black and white.

I agree with consumer applications, although the volumes I am referring to here are certainly sub consumer volumes. High enough to benefit from scale but perhaps not mass production – more like cottage production.

The OSH project sounds interesting do you have any links?

PC/104 was overkill for the sort of applications we were considering.

Yup I have seen Buglabs which is very interesting but also high cost.

I was purposely avoiding business models as am pursuing this outside of those interests. However I do believe in the “Because effect” among other Opensource benefits. I also don’t see much money in hardware manufacture unless you are gunning for consumer volumes so I rule that out straightaway, I am personally looking to get Hardware produced by anyone in the community as low cost as possible. Thus if someone can make stuff cheaper then that is good it means our designs/idea go further and benefit more folks and deliver even more value.

You also have to look at the business model, if the hardware can be easily manufactured cheaper by third parties, where is the revenue stream?

Also, just because a board is small and simple doesn’t make it low cost. Low costs are achieved through mass production.

If the purpose was for education or rapid prototyping then the constraint of modular designs could be overlooked. But to create usable consumer products at low cost would be impossible.

As it happens I am working on an OSH project, called Lyre, a Digital Audio Player. It would certainly help to have some modules to snap together to at least create a prototype.

What about PC/104? Is that not the standard for embedded computing?

Basically I think the digital genie has escaped from the bottle and is now leaking into reality..

Al

http://www.orangecone.com/archives/2009/03/open_hardware_a.html

http://www.ugotrade.com/2009/03/18/dematerializing-the-world-shadows-subscriptions-and-things-as-services-talking-with-mike-kuniavsky-at-etech-2009/

If you have any questions about it, please feel free to email me or better still join Github (its free) and send messages there in context.

Thanks for dropping by

regards
Al