Open Hardware still a minority interest

Posted Mar 10, 2006 17:00 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: Open Graphics schematics posted by freeio
Parent article: Open Graphics schematics posted

Having been playing this game myself for the last few years, originally with the Lart (site currently down?) and now Balloon. I have to agree with a lot of what FreeIO has said. It's a bit of an uphill struggle, and the compelling advantages of Free Software are a lot harder to see in Open Hardware. There _are_ advantages, but you have to care about them enough to counter the higher cost.

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...