[Discuss] [Open Manufacturing] Re: Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam, New York City, April 26-28

[Javier Serrano]

On 03/07/2013 09:43 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> cern - http://www.ohwr.org/projects/bpm-dbe/repository (oops, i was
> wrong, they have no specification document)

This is just one among the ~100 projects in ohwr.org. This site aims at
hosting Open Source Hardware designs and is indeed run by CERN. For
scalability and maintenance reasons the scope is reduced to hardware
related in some way to controls and data acquisition for Physics
facilities. The site itself, including plugins we have developed for
Chiliproject, is all open source so people are free to reuse anything
they want.

The example you quoted is not a mature design. Here are a couple of
better examples:

http://www.ohwr.org/projects/spec/wiki
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/fmc-adc-100m14b4cha/wiki

So far we have just used common sense ("the least common of the senses",
I know!) and published everything needed to view, modify and manufacture
the boards and test them.

We are quite happy about:

- The functionality ohwr.org offers.
- The response from companies which commercialize these designs.
- The legal framework provided by the CERN Open Hardware Licence.

Of course, everything is perfectible and I am following discussions in
this list with interest!

What we are focusing our OSHW effort on these days is design tools. We
are contributing to Icarus Verilog and Kicad [1]. I think this is the
biggest hurdle for effective sharing right now, and I hope this year and
2014 will see big changes in this domain. Once we have put our act
together I will send more details in case someone wants to help.

Cheers,

Javier

[1] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki