open-source hardware

Pulling back from open source hardware, MakerBot angers some adherents

You likely know MakerBot Industries as the poster child for the new era of 3D-printing. You might not know that, until last week, the company and its CEO, Bre Pettis, were considered shining lights in the open-source hardware movement.

Think of open-source hardware, OSHW, as the physical equivalent of open source software. The Open Source Hardware Association, founded just this past March, offers an extended definition for OSHW. Its Statement of Principles sums things up thusly:

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or … Read more

Culture hacker talks Kinect bounty hunt (Q&A)

When Microsoft's hot new Kinect motion-sensitive controller was released earlier this month, Phil Torrone and Limor Fried saw an opportunity to subvert what was being presented as a closed system.

Torrone and Fried, the principals behind the open-source hardware firm Adafruit Industries, love almost any kind of culture hacking, and in the Kinect, they recognized a system that presented users far more utility than Microsoft was offering.

Not wasting the chance to raise a bit of a stir, Adafruit said it would pony up $1,000 to the first person who could come up with an open-source driver for … Read more

Hacker wins contest for open-source Kinect driver

A hacker won $3,000 today for being the first person to successfully create an open-source driver for Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensitive controller.

Last week, open-source hardware developers Adafruit Industries offered $1,000 to the first person or team to complete the task. After Microsoft told CNET that it did not "condone the modification of its products," Adafruit upped the bounty to $2,000 and later $3,000.

Now, Adafruit writes on its blog, a hacker named Hector has created the driver (see video below), and is taking home the three grand.

"Hector has decided to invest … Read more

Bounty offered for open-source Kinect driver

Update at 4:03 p.m. PT: This story has been modified with response from Microsoft.

The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a $2,000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer.

Kinect, which launched today, is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough.

And that's why Adafruit--led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip … Read more

Open-source hardware standards formally issued

NEW YORK--There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.

Until now, that is.

Unlike open-source software, because there have been no formal definitions, many people may not even be aware of the growing industry. But already some of those practicing its general principles have become household names among the geek set: Arduino, the programmable single-board microcontroller and software suite; Chumby, a popular Wi-Fi device; MakerBot, a low-priced 3D printer; and Adafruit, a maker of do-it-yourself hardware kits for things like MP3 players and more.

Late Tuesday, a group … Read more

Open-source hardware, start-ups, and land wars in Asia

Had Vizzini of "The Princess Bride" lived to relate a third "classic blunder" beyond land wars in Asia and competing with Sicilians, he might have urged start-ups to avoid hardware-dependent strategies. Hardware, after all, can be expensive to build and can't match software for ease (and cost) of distribution.

So, is hardware a bad idea for start-ups? Or are we just thinking about hardware in the wrong way?

Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign suggests that the hardware business, long shunned by Silicon Valley VCs for its costs and complexities, may be getting easier due to ready-made … Read more

Sun's growth problem may be open source, says a former Sun executive

By all accounts, including its own, Sun Microsystems has a growth problem. Savio at IBM thinks it's best solved by selling more hardware (servers and storage). I've argued that software offers an answer.

Larry Singer, former vice president of Global Information Systems Strategy at Sun, suggested that an overemphasis on open source is not the right answer:

"The hard part is we were spending all of our time and attention inside [Sun] on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company," said Singer.… Read more

BugLabs grows the open-source hardware ecosystem

In the beginning was the Chumby. And on the second day the community created the BUG, the latest entrant in the open-source hardware market.

Open-source hardware hasn't really taken off...yet. But Dave Rosenberg today alerted me to a new player in the space from BugLabs, which hopes to develop in much the same way that open-source software does. Here's BUG's premise:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don't define the final products - you do.

Silicon Alley Insider took a look and likes what it saw. But the most interesting thing from its report was how small the (initial) market is:… Read more