Category: Hardware

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Jean Lievens: Open Source Electronics, 3D Printing, & Robotics Creating a Revolution in Manufacturing

Hardware, Software
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

From www.huffingtonpost.com – February 8, 11:16 PM

Three innovations — 3D printing, robotics, and open source electronics — are breaking that mold of manufacturing. They're ushering in a new era based on customization, on demand manufacturing, and regional, even local manufacturing.

3D Printing Has Started A Revolution

Paul R. Brody

Huffington Post, 30 January 2014

The revolution brewing in electronics is unprecedented — even for an industry that is used to being upended. The rules that defined a century of innovation, design, and production are about to be rewritten. And modern manufacturing will be swept away.

Few companies grasp the coming upheaval. Perhaps because 3D printing, an innovation that can come across as a curiosity, is propelling this disruption. Yet, these printers, which churn out objects by laying thin layer after thin layer of metal, plastics or other materials on top of each other, won't tip the scale alone.

It's their collision with two other disruptive technologies — intelligent robotics and open source electronics — that will bring an end to the era of big and complex global supply chains. Together, they're going to usher in the digitalization of manufacturing, by creating flexible, fast, local supply chains underpinned by software.

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MicroGen: Open Source Vehicles

Design, Hardware
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Open source vehicles get a green light with Tabby

Open hardware is gaining speed. The appetite for open source vehicles is growing. And while we may not have flying cars yet, we do have Tabby—an open source car design released by Open Source Vehicle this October.

Want to swap out an internal combustible engine for an eco-friendly electric? Tabby can do that. And, this open source vehicle is not just for makers—it’s production ready. Tabby will be rolling off the assembly line in early 2014. Will you see Tabby cruising your streets?

In this interview, we found out more about Tabby and got some insight into the open hardware movement from the team at Open Source Vehicle.

Read full interview.

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Jean Lievens: Motorola Project Ara, Building Smart Phones From Modular Open Source Hardware

Hardware
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Motorola Wants Everyone To Build Smartphones Like Lego Kits

Introducing Project Ara, an experiment from Motorola aimed to creating smartphones made out of modular open source hardware.

ReadWrite.com,

Google has teased us before. Rumors swirled for months that Motorola would introduce a customizable smartphone that would let consumers decide what kind of hardware—a bigger battery, choice of processor, a better camera—they wanted. The notion of a consumer-grade open hardware platform quickened the heartbeats of geeks across the globe.

What we got instead was the Moto X, a smartphone that can be “customized” by picking your colors, getting an engraving on the back and adding a personalized message to the startup screen. This was not the revolution in smartphone hardware we wanted.

Still, Motorola’s engineers were paying attention. Today the company announced Project Ara, an open hardware platform where users can pick and choose what type of components they want to build their smartphones.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

The Module Connects To The Endoskeleton

Motorola has been thinking about Project Ara for a year. It started the campaign with a project called “Sticky,” a truck wrapped in Velcro and loaded with rooted and hackable Motorola smartphone components and 3D printing equipment. The truck would hold “MakeAThon” events with engineers who would take the raw components and build their own smartphones.

Project Ara aims to take that concept to its logical conclusion. According to Motorola, Project Ara is a “free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.”

The devices are built out of what Motorola calls endoskeletons and modules. The “endo” is the frame of the device, while the modules are the hardware, which could be just about anything that a hardware developer could dream up. Want a smartphone that specializes in barometric readings and air humidity? If someone designs and builds a module focused on sensor capabilities, you could add it to an endoskeleton—although with other modules like a CPU, storage, a camera, a radio and so forth.

Read rest of article.

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Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Education, Governance, Hardware, Innovation, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Software, Spectrum
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Overheard in the World Cafe:

Speaker A:  My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.

Speaker B:  Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations.  Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman.  And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.

Speaker A:  Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.

Speaker B:  As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app?  Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP”

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$99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware — Funded by Kickstarter

Hardware
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$99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware

Parallella is a low cost supercomputer designed by Adapteva using Xilinx Zynq-7010/7020 FPGA+2x Cortex A9 SoC combined with Adapteva Ephipany 16 or 64 cores epiphany coprocessor. The project had a successful kickstarter campaign which allowed then to provide the 16-core version for $99, and the 64-core version for $750. The board will soon be shipped to people who pledged on kickstarter, and one of the promise of the campaign was to fully open source the platform, and today, they just fulfilled that.

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Jean Lievens: The Do It Yourself Maker Movement

Hardware, Manufacturing, Materials, Resilience, Software, Transparency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

“In this chapter, we investigate the maker subculture and its manifestation in fabbing ecosystem. In other words, how the love of making things, hacking, tinkering, circuit bending and doing/making everything so-called DIY is a significant peculiarity of Fab Labs. We first look at the meaning and the emergence of the maker subculture and the development of hackerspaces and shared machines shops. Secondly, we explore how the maker community is shaped and organized. In a third point, this chapter details a Fab approach of architecture, art and fashion. Finally, we see how hobbyists moved from do-it-yourself (DIY) to do-it-together (DIT) activities with examples of making music instruments and biotech.”

Complete P2P Foundation Page below the line.  Links added.

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