Open Graphics schematics posted

I think that if tools to create hardware become more ubiquitous then it could be possible.

Like if you could run down to the store and buy or maybe rent time on some sort of a inkjet printer that could print out layers of silicon and metal to build up a circuit board in a relatively inexpensive way based on designs you could download from the internet.

Of course then you'd have to figure out a sane way to sodier all the tiny things on that. And then if the tools to program FPGAs were relatively inexpensive and accessable..

Then maybe you'd start to see more interest.

The nice thing about software, I guess, is that the tools are cheap and acccessable. Also software is a community thing were you can take a existing code and apply it to lots of different purposes. Also software is modifiable and if you find bugs they can be fixed and then patches redistributed.

With hardware pretty much none of that is true.

Oh well. I would be 100% perfectly happy if hardware companies would simply release specs, for the software accessable portions, that would provide the nessicary documentation for writing drivers or whatnot.

An example of a group who do are educational institutions like universities, which care more about complete openness than most. So the Balloon has been taken up by The Cambridge/MIT Multidisciplinary Design Project, for example, who are promoting the whole concept of Free Software, Open Hardware, and Open Design tools in order to learn about computers and robotics and do 'cool stuff'.

But in our case it is enthusiastic local companies that have made the thing possible. The Lart design was paid for by TU Delft research money, whereas Balloon2 and now 3 (see cool pics from last week's brand new hardware!) have been paid for largely by Toby Churchill Ltd (who use Balloons as the basis of their commercial products) with help from the University. Balloon3 has probably cost GBP 60,000 (100,000 $/euro) so far (prototype build), which isn't a huge amount of money, but it's beyond the means of individuals and very small companies. And you have to spend that sort of money every 3 years because the silicon changes.

A large part of the problem is that the costs of making software versatile are low, and compile-time options to cut out the bits you don't need are not a big deal. In hardware, in order to make a board useful to enough people to make it viable a certain amount of generality and versatility is needed. But this costs in various ways - it makes the design more complicated, and thus slower and more expensive. And although you can do builds with different BOMs, the smaller each run is the more the boards cost. And the difference between a GBP 300 Balloon and GBP 100 proprietary board is enough to put most people off. We're hoping that Balloon3 will be More like GBP 200 and thus vaguely competitive, but it remains to be seen how the pricing works out in practice.

The Lart was one of the last modern computers you could build by hand at home. Now that everything has gone BGA and the passives are almost invisible, self-building is simply not practical anymore, so Open Hardware building can only work through companies or institutions with enough money to get hardware built in the normal way. (Obviously for sufficiently simple designs it is still possible to build your own, but that's not the sort of design I am talking about here). And even then we are building batches of 100 (in the UK) rather than 1,000,000 (in China) which is why an Ipaq gets you a lot more hardware for your money. That shows no sign of changing in the immediate future.

The other thing FreeIO mentioned is tools. Things have been steadily improving but hardware companies are still very jealous about their software and interfaces and don't really want to provide Free tools. Groups like OpenTech, Open Collector and Open JTAG (just the ones I have come into contact with - I am sure there are others) are all doing their bits to improve matters, but we need more people who understand this stuff involved, and probably a slightly higher marketing (spit!) to engineering ratio to get a bit more cash into the system.

Just to end on a positive note, we _have_ managed to make a business out of this: not much of one, but we're still here, filling our niche. And being an optimistic kind of guy I'm still hopefull that Open Hardware will become more popular. We shall see...