The Open Souce Hardware Association have been a driving force in certifying and promoting open-source hardware. This year, they’re having a fundraising drive and will be doing a live stream on October 2nd to kick off October, which is Open Hardware Month! Part of this stream is about sharing and discussing open hardware projects, talking about how to get projects certified, and also trying to get 100 new OSHWA members.
Supporting OSHWA is a great way to help promote open hardware in general and OSHWA certification in particular! It also helps them organize and put on the annual Open Hardware Summit, which this year was in Montreal, Canada if you missed it. It was an awesome event with tons of great talks and workshops, and the 2025 event promises to be just as amazing. It will be taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland this coming May 30th and 31st, 2025!
I (Tindie Blog editor Alexander Rowsell) will be on the Show & Tell stream at 9:20PM Eastern Time to talk about Tindie’s relationship with Open Hardware and how we promote Certified Open Hardware on the website! Drop by if you have any questions for me, and be sure to tune in and catch all the fabulous people that will be talking about all sorts of cool projects.
The 2023 Open Source Hardware Association Summit starts in just a few hours! You can watch the live stream for free by going to their YouTube channel. Of course, donations and memberships are always greatly appreciated if you’re in a position to contribute. If you’re in the New York area and want to attend, there are still some tickets available! If cost is a barrier, they have asked that you contact them directly and they’ll find a way to get you in the conference.
I’m personally looking forward to seeing our very own Laurel Cummings’ talk tomorrow at 11AM titled “Your Technological Go-Bag and You: Consolidating Your Workbench for the Field”. Laurel has volunteered multiple times with disaster recovery teams and her insights on what makes a good Tech Go-Bag will be extremely valuable! Make sure to check out the entire speaker schedule to see who is speaking when and what workshops are happening.
Also, if you want to hang out with other people attending (both virtually and in-person) join the OSHWA Discord server! If you see me there, be sure to say hi!
It’s that time of year again! The 2023 Open Hardware Summit by the Open Source Hardware Association is just around the corner. This year, the Summit will be held both in-person in New York City, as well as streamed online for virtual attendees all over the world! Tickets are available now; the summit is on April 28th and 29th, 2023.
Tindie is proud to once again be sponsoring the Summit. Our very own Laurel Cummings will be speaking on Day 2, at 11AM! Her talk is about creating a technological go-bag, for those of us that travel a lot or need to do work in the field often. Make sure to bookmark her talk!
There’s a litany of amazing speakers again this year; check out the full list here. One of the other talks that jumped out at me is Steph Piper’s talk on creating great instructions. One of the Achilles’ heels of many awesome open-source projects is a lack of quality documentation. It can make a huge difference; so if you’re an open-source project creator, make sure to check out Steph’s talk on Day 1 at 4pm.
If you attend in person, you’ll get a sweet swag bag with all sorts of cool stuff! For those who can’t make it physically, this year they’re also emailing out a digital swag bag. I think this is a really cool idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s in it!
Yes, it’s that time of year again — Open Hardware Month! Every October, the Open Source Hardware Association reaches out to the hacker community with information about Open Hardware, how to get your projects certified, and encouraging people to become members of the OSHWA!
Open Source Hardware is hardware whose source files can be freely shared, modified, and reproduced without encumberment. Anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell designs that are certified Open Hardware! This is a great way to help spark innovation and collaboration. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel — if someone has already created the part you are looking for, you can extend or modify it as needed for your application.
Getting certified is easy! The OSHWA website has a very comprehensive overview of all the steps required to be certified. If you’re ready to certify, head over to the application page and set your hardware free for the whole world to use. You will get a registration number that you can use to show your project is certified, and if you sell on Tindie your project will even get into the special OSHWA-certified category! Here on the blog, we always keep an eye out for OSHWA-certified projects, so keep an eye on the blog and see what cool Open Source Hardware comes through the pages of Tindie.
Usually, OSHWA organizes or hosts events, but due to the ongoing pandemic, they have once again asked people to only organize events where it is safe to do so. Keep an eye out for events being promoted over on the OSHWA Twitter account and see if anything pops up near you! Another way to get involved is to join the OSHWA Discord server. You will meet hackers doing all sorts of cool open-source hardware stuff!
I wanted to also highlight one of my favourite tools OSHWA has developed: the Open Source Licenses “Facts” Generator. It creates labels in the style of typical nutrition facts stickers, but with all your licenses listed! It’s a great thing to put in your documentation, or in the README of your Git repo. This way, your users can quickly see which licenses are used.
Finally, the OSHWA are also doing their yearly survey. If you have the time to respond, please do! It helps them decide how to spend their time and resources most effectively.
The 2022 OHS was on April 22, 2022. It was held online this year — though hopefully next year will be in person! The summit was a great success, and it was hugely informative and entertaining. The opening keynote by Ashley Jane Lewis was simply amazing. As a white man, I don’t feel it’s my place to try and summarize or repeat her message — I simply would like you to go see it and hear it for yourself. You can watch the keynote here:
The summit celebrated all the amazing contributions to Open Hardware over the last year, and as I mentioned in my previous post I was really looking forward to the Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals talk. And they didn’t disappoint! Not only did we get to see some adorable animals (including tapirs and ocelots and sun bears) but we also got to see how Open Hardware was helping to make a real impact on the quality of life of these endangered species. Valencia the tapir showed us that interesting open source hardware doesn’t have to be high-tech! Often low-tech solutions (like a pineapple on a string) can solve the problem (tapir needing stimulation). Not coincidentally, I now really want to visit their lab (Dinalab) in Panama! You can see their entire talk here. Check out some of their clientele in the image below.
As sponsors of the 2022 Summit, we at Tindie got to chat with a bunch of attendees at our virtual “table”. We talked about neat products that are Open Hardware Certified, such as the Mooltipass and the Vinduino (a past Hackaday Prize winner!) that are listed on Tindie. Our sister website Hackaday was there also, revealing info about this year’s upcoming Hackaday Prize. The first challenge Planet-Friendly Power is almost over, and on May 1st the second challenge Reuse, Recycle, Revamp starts. So get your sustainable ideas flowing, and create a project on Hackaday.io to enter the contest!
Sustainability was another key topic at the summit. One of the talks that I really enjoyed was Helen Little’s talk about recycling plastics into 3D printable pellets. She works for a company called re:3D making large-scale 3D printers. They are very interested in creating a sustainable process for reusable, 3D printable plastics. While there are already some filaments available made with recycled plastics, they want to be able to feed ground up plastic directly into a printer.
In order for this process to be practical and sustainable, the resulting plastic pellets have to have material properties that are consistent and strong enough to displace some of the brand-new materials from the market. In order to test the materials, they first dehydrate the recycled plastic, as most plastics are hydrophilic and will pull water from the air. Then using an open-source tool called ImageJ, the particles of the plastic are analyzed to check for grain size differences between different recycling processes. Then they create many prints, including standard additive test pieces like NIST’s Standard Test Artifact (public domain!) and a few other prints for testing various parameters like bed adhesion and extrusion rate (like the Moai above!). There is just so much detail to go into that I strongly recommend you just go watch her talk if you are interested!
The entire summit was a lot of fun. It was great to connect with a bunch of other hackers interested in all sorts of things! If you’re working on something and want to get it certified as Open Hardware, check out their website at https://www.oshwa.org/ and click on the Certification page. If you want to watch the entire summit or just certain talks, check out their YouTube channel where the individual talks have now been uploaded. You can also see the archive of the whole stream.
The Open Hardware Summit happens every year in the spring, and this year is once again happening online on April 22, 2022. Every OHS is jam-packed with awesome talks; this year hackers working on everything from sustainability to pellet 3D printing to open source laptops will be filling the 8-hour event. This year, Tindie, Hackaday, and Supplyframe are all sponsoring the event, and will be running a virtual ‘booth’ on the OHS Discord server which we encourage you to check out during the summit! The booth will be discussing Tindie & Open Hardware, as well as details about this year’s Hackaday Prize.
There are so many fabulous talks this year, but a few to keep an eye on are Leon Anavi’s talk about using open source software to make open source hardware – Open Source Tools for Making Open Source Hardware runs from 11:50 to 12:10. Another Tindie friend, Alex Glow, will be talking about A Better Hardware Life Cycle: Build Stuff Without Feeling Like a Jerk from 10:40 to 11:00. This talk is all about sustainability in open hardware; how to choose materials, design, produce and repair in an Eco-friendly and sustainable way.
Another talk that shouldn’t be missed is Andy Quitmeyer’s Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals! I mean, we get to look at cute animals playing with open source hardware to help keep them stimulated, healthy, and happy! What’s not to love? This talk is at 15:20 and runs until 15:40.
Tickets are still available! The goodie bag has some really cool stuff in it this year, including some very awesome artwork by Dushan Milic. Buying a ticket helps support OSHWA and the costs of running OHS. If you are unable to afford a ticket due to financial difficulty, don’t worry – you can watch the livestream for free!
It’s October, and that means it is Open Hardware Month! The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) takes each October to highlight various things in the OSHW world, and this year the focus is on Label and Certify. The Label section is about how to identify OSHW products and how OSHW manufacturers should label their hardware; the Certify section is all about the OSHW certification process — what’s required, how to apply, and what it means to be OSHW certified!
The OSHWA offers a really neat tool that they call the Facts generator. It helps you generate a nice SVG graphic that shows exactly what licenses apply to your hardware, software, and documentation. The defaults are the CERN Open Hardware License for hardware; the GNU Public License 3.0 or later for software; and Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 for documentation. It’s very easy to modify; for example, I could use this for the way I license my personal projects:
This is a great way to mark your projects as open-source. Simply take the generated code, paste it into a blank text document, and then save it with an .svg extension. You can then use a program like GIMP or Inkscape to export it as PNG for use on websites, or a tool like svg2mod to import it into your KiCAD projects, for example. Clearly stating your choice of licenses is an important step in getting your hardware project certified as OSHW!
The other focus of OHW month this year is Certify: what is required to certify a project as OHW with the OSHWA?
The hardware design must be released under an open-source hardware license; eg, CERN, Solderpad, TAPR, etc.
Documentation must be released under a Creative Commons license
All files must be available in the preferred format for making changes — schematics must be available in .sch format, not PDF, for example
There cannot be any restriction on commercial usage for any part of the project (the CC license cannot be No-Commerical, for example)
You must provide the OSHWA with your contact information and all relevant information about the project, as well as agree to the OSHWA Certification Mark License Agreement
Make sure you fully read and understand the Certification Process section of their website — it gives detailed information and examples of how and why you might want to make your hardware open source! The FAQ is also a great source of information.
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