Hardware: The New Open Source Driving Innovation

Tod Kurt @todbotCo-founderThingM

Fast Product Designwith OSHW

Hardware Innovation Workshop

16 May 2012, Xerox PARC

Tod E. Kurt, ThingM

Who Am I?

Who Am I?

How is Open Source Useful for

Hardware Development?

free exchange of ideasleverage the cleverness of others

But Mostly...

you save time

And, you get to work with othersAnd, it’s fun

Hardware Design Process

• Ideation / Product Design• Hardware design / Schematic & Layout• Product Visualization• Firmware & Software

Example Product:blink(1)

IdeationLook to similar devices for inspiration

Schematic & Board Layout

Explore different chips, different layouts

Choose one, or all, to get PCB fabbed

Visualization

SketchUp + EagleUp

Visualization

SketchUp + CAD import

Visualization & Usability3D printouts w/ Makerbot

Software & Firmware

not your problem

blink(1)USB pipeline

Firmware

Open devtools for many chipsets

Atmel AVR: Arduino & AVR-GCCTI MSP430: MSPGCCMicrochip PIC: SDCC

USB stacks

Open USB stacks are growing too:

V-USB (AVR/sw) LUFA (AVR/hw) 16FUSB (PIC/sw)

Dangerous Prototypes (PIC/hw)

Application APIs

Processing / JavaWxWidgets

GCCHTML5 / Node.js

Some open & cross platform toolkits:

But better to go native

What’s Difficult Still?

“Last mile” to screen & keyboard

Atoms (enclosures, etc)

The Upside

Idea to functional prototype in 2 weeks

Multiple design studies on multiple chip architectures

Manufactureable in a month

Giving Back

your

company

blog

Publish!

Get the makers on your side They’re early adopters, recommenders

Thank You

@thingm / @todbot

http://thingm.com/

http://todbot.com/blog/