List of open-source hardware
From AdCiv
One open resource vital to an economy of abundance would be vast libraries of machines and components. These are designs to be made available through the Internet to anyone, including CAD files for the shape of each part, assembly instructions, circuit board designs and all the information and blueprints necessary to build a machine. Rather than buying them from centralized manufacturers, anyone who wants something like a mobile phone can just download the design and replicate it by one of the methods given here. Of these methods, the RepLab would be the ideal for the abundance economy that is starting to form at a grassroots level around the world now. A RepLab is a collection of machines capable of cutting metal or plastic to any shape, printing circuit boards, and thus putting together just about any mechanical or electronic device (including building another RepLab). If these start to spread around the world (and it is probable that they will in the next two years or so), free and open-source designs could be turned into machines for the price of raw materials.
Here is a list of some of the most interesting open-source hardware projects created so far —
- Elphel, a digital camera
- Arduino, a computer processor
- Neo 1973, a smartphone
- The Solar Heat Pump Electrical Generation System (SHPEGS), a hybrid thermal and photovoltaic solar electricity generator.
- RepRap, a 3-D printer for turning 3-D designs on a computer into plastic objects
- The XO-2 laptop. This is the famous '$100 dollar laptop' designed to spread the world's information to children in poor countries. Nicholas Negroponte has said the XO-2's design will be open-sourced[1], though this has not yet happened.
- Bug Labs, a computer with WiFi and BlueTooth functionality, with modules incorporating a touchscreen, a webcam, a GPS and other add-ons that can be clipped together like Lego.
- DSPdap, an mp3 player
- OpenEEG, a modular electroencephalogram that can be adapted to any number of electrodes.
- OScar and Common - cars
- The SXM Project - tools for DIY nanotechnology
- OpenPCR - a polymerase chain reaction
machine, a fundamental tool of modern biotechnology that can be used for sequencing DNA
- Farm Fountain, "a scuptural ecosystem you can eat", for growing food indoors in minimal space
An mp3 player, a laptop, a smartphone, a digital camera — most of the machines you need to live a pretty nice modern life can be gotten for the cost of fabrication. These projects are at various stages of development.
