OpenFest 2013 Open Source Hardware (OSHW) made in Bulgaria

Open Source Hardware Made in Bulgaria

OpenFest 2013


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OLIMEX Ltd 22+ years of experience with Hardware and Electronic Design600+ 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 knowledgeStanding on the shoulders of giants



- Some people are happy just to let others use their ideas, to leave a trace behind. Releasing source documents can be a way of showing the world the glory of your design



- 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 arent 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


Open Fest 2013 2013, OLIMEX Ltdreleased under CC BY-SA 3.0

OpenFest 2013 Open Source Hardware (OSHW) made in Bulgaria

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