[Discuss] The institutionalization of OSHW

Andrew Stone stone at toastedcircuits.com
Sun Sep 30 14:07:14 UTC 2012


 > if it is any consolation, those throwing stones are usually not actually
contributors to
> anything, just fanboys who slipped into a wingnut state.

I think you can always tell the end of a thread when the trolls reduce it
to an ad hominem (against the person, not the issue) attack.  But
unfortunately this sort of email requires one final response... and a final
exhortation to readers to actually consider the issue: are we seeing a
transformation in the motivation for not opening... from one of practice (I
would if I could but the tools are not there) to one of philosophy (I will
hold some % back to protect my business model from cloners, and so
ultimately contribute more then if my company had failed)?

Yes, Federico I am a fanboy from as far back as
2009<http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2009/10/well-deserved-plug.html>and
proud of it.

As for my contributions, thank you for the opportunity to post them!


Arduino library for the M5451 LED driver here:
http://code.google.com/p/arduino-m5451-current-driver/  Schematics and
board layouts are in there too.

Here's a USB CDC-ACM (serial port) implementation (and hardware design) on
the absolutely smallest and cheapest USB microprocessor available:
https://github.com/gandrewstone/toastedCypressUsb It will flash AVR chips
(but tricks the Arduino IDE into thinking its just doing a normal serial
"upload") and talk serial over SPI to them.

You can download the modified Arduino bootloader (referred to in the fanboy
link) here: http://code.google.com/p/toastedboot/ .  It has one really cool
feature which is that it can detect a double click (or more) of the reset
button.

You can also get:

An XML-based in-code documentation generator here:
http://code.google.com/p/yadog/  Its cool because adding a new language is
reduced to transforming subsets of that language's syntax to XML.  Or don't
bother, if you can embed XML into the source code comments, you can use
yadog with languages it does not understand (or use a hybrid approach!).

A LIN protocol (single wire UART serial) implementation over wiring
(Arduino) APIs: https://github.com/gandrewstone/LIN

An implementation of some of the fundamental Wiring APIs
(digitalRead/Write, analogRead, etc) over some "raw" AVR chips:
https://github.com/gandrewstone/avrez.  This helps people transition from
Arduino to breadboarded chips.

And lots of smaller stuff scattered everywhere, including a few very small
bugfix pushes to the Arduino project...

All of this is supported by my blog:
http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/ which focuses mostly on home
soldering techniques, OSHW tutorials and programming.

Cheers!
Andrew





On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi at acm.org>wrote:

> Well put Phillip,
>   It is indeed frustrating when someone releases to the public and instead
> of "thank you" the answer is a flame as happened to the Makerbot crew.
>  Some elements of the community tend to forget that nobody has any
> obligation to share their hard work, it is a choice that should be honored,
> not bashed with "not enough" by those with a sense of entitlement out of
> control.
>
>   It is nothing new, we have been seeing this on the software side of the
> Creative Commons world for more than a decade — if it is any consolation,
> those throwing stones are usually not actually contributors to anything,
> just fanboys who slipped into a wingnut state.
>
>   As Limor said two years ago (I think it was the Summit Keynote), "haters
> gonna hate".
>
>    Keep on Rocking -F
>
> On Sep 28, 2012, at 10:04 PM, phillip torrone wrote:
>
> > 2 weeks ago i got the usual once-a-month "purity" email from some random
> person saying "you're not open source because you use quickbooks, or
> windows, or EAGLE" etc.. but now this week adafruit along with sparkfun is
> back to being a "good example of an open source hardware" company.
> >
> > i read your post and you say "Ok fine, I understand the need to
> discourage knock-offs.  But if you do this you are NOT 100% Open Source
> Hardware." -
> >
> > ok, but really, who is or isn't open source enough this week?
> >
> > is sparkfun 100%, is adafruit 100%, what about EMSL? they have a kit
> that's not OSHW, so does everyone else who i consider an oshw company. are
> we pure enough?
> >
> > our company statement, actually, limor's is "we're going to keep
> shipping OSHW while everyone argues about open source hardware". we're
> going to keep doing open source, we'll show that's an amazing cause and an
> amazing business, smart people will want to join us.
> >
> > last week the most vocal voices in the open source 3d printing community
> didn't inspire anyone to want to join their cause, in fact a 3d printer
> maker told me "wow, glad we never did (or will do open source). that's the
> worst thing i think, people steering clear of open source because of a
> "damned if you do, damned if you don't?
> >
> > i really don't know what's next, but i'm thinking about. for now,  i'm
> really excited about the OSHWA, because they're a group of people that has
> the mission to celebrate OSHW companies, i'd like to know i can work hard
> and someone *else* is going to say "these folks are doing OSHW, support
> them".
> >
> > i'm going to do my best to get them members and help them celebrate oshw.
> >
> > join in :)
> >
> > cheers,
> > pt
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sep 28, 2012, at 2:07 PM, Andrew Stone <stone at toastedcircuits.com>
> wrote:
> > As I listened to the OSHW summit speakers, I felt a pretty disturbing
> trend towards closing aspects of some products, and "yes-sirring" both real
> and "fake" regulatory bodies (as opposed to reluctantly complying) by the
> well-regarded members of our community.  And then of course there were lots
> of great presentations of cool stuff that completely disregarded all that.
> >>
> >> Looks like some of us are growing up :-(.  Did you feel that way?
> >>
> >> My full blog posting:
> http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-institutionalization-of-oshw.html
> >>
> >> Cheers!
> >> Andrew
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> discuss mailing list
> >> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> >> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > discuss mailing list
> > discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> > http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
> _________________________________________
> -- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
> (Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20120930/ab6eaf98/attachment.html>


More information about the discuss mailing list