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The idea of open source development is slowly getting hold of hardware development. There are still some hoops to take but in general the idea of opening the construction and electronic sources to the public and letting a wide and rather indefinite public decide which way they go has some charm.

Hoops

The biggest problem in an open source hardware project has to be the cost of ‘building’ (or copying) the product. While software-projects can basically be copied endlessly without further cost other than the initial time consumption for development, copying hardware implies buying the raw material and processing it with added time-investment for every new copy.

The manufacturing process from source to binary application revolves around some sort of ‘make’-batch plus some bug fixing depending on the original source quality and the platform for which the source is being built. Ideally, you won’t even need to build the project, since some other guy built the binaries for your platform and you can download them right away. In a hardware project you’ll need some expensive tools to manufacture the raw material into the finished product. The only cost-reduction in an open source hardware project would be the expertise and the development time.

Bringing 2.0 into the factory

Still, having a community think about needed features and how they can be achieved can be a upside to a product and give it a marketing advantage. On the whole opening up development cycles and sharing the knowledge of modern industries can bring that web2.0-effect to a business sector that has always been marked as a monopolistic market. What if a startup in the traditional industrial sector could achieve the same success story as did some startups in application and internet development sector?

Open Source Car

One such open source hardware project - and the most fabulous but yet rather immature one - is the Open Source Car.

The idea behind the OScar project is simple: A community of people plans and develops a new car in the web. The idea is about the goal to develop a simple and innovative car, but also about the way how this goal is achieved. We would like to convey the idea of Open Source to “hardware” and we want OScar to be the precursor for many different projects in this field. If you are interested in how the idea was formed, read the manifesto of 1999.

Unfortunately right now the OScar project is stuck in a position, where there is much discussion going on in the forums, but actual decisions don’t seem to be taken. For example, one major subject is the design of the car. While there are some suggestions mostly contributed in the form of 2d-sketches, nobody is taking up the task of actually modeling them into a 3d-design.

Open Source CAD/CAM

Another major problem is the lack of a good open source cad-software package. Since the project tries to use other open source projects as a foundation, so that everybody is legally able to contribute, they can’t really use PTC Pro/Engineer or Dassault CATIA. Surprisingly, there are some open source alternatives, though none of them is even half as sophisticated.

• BRL CAD - used by the US military.
• FreeCAD

I hope to get to know those applications in the near future and will hopefully continue the article about where open source hardware projects stand and what we can achieve with them. To be continued..