To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard

Re:To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard by tesseract on Friday December 19, 2014 @06:46AM (#8771858)

That sort of library is basically what the industry's vast catalog of integrated circuits amounts to, except that it is not open source and generally at a higher level of abstraction than the subcircuits you describe.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard by flarets on Friday December 19, 2014 @08:23AM (#8772075)

Really? I thought ICs were more along the lines of microcontrollers which have things like USB controllers, PWM controllers, GPIO etc. For these, it's mostly programming.

The library I described was supposed to be about all the external bits: signal conditioning, power conditioning, sensors etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard by pjc50 on Friday December 19, 2014 @08:49AM (#8772177)

Well, those aren't the hard bits, you can generally pull them out of a textbook or reference design and expect them to work.

You're overlooking the entire field of analogue ICs. Again, there's a fairly good cookbook of reference circuits out there. In some cases manufacturers will help you a lot: TI have a tool for designing switchmode power supplies around their chips.

So you can compose circuits into schematics. You don't usually compose layouts as it's more compact to hand-redo them for your particular board shape. There is some open source hardware at this level; often to be found on tindie or via hackaday.

Then the other obstacles to shipping a product: regulatory approval. EMC testing. If it plugs into the mains, a whole bunch of safety testing. In the EU, CE marking and WEEE registration. If it has a radio, radio approval.

Economy of scale matters as well. That's why things like OpenWRT are so popular: repurpose hardware that's already mass-manufactured for a slightly different purpose.

[ Parent | on HN ]