In this post I will be calling it “free hardware”. It's a pity, but writing or pronouncing “Free Digital Hardware Designs” is just too much. Sorry.
There is a new article about free hardware by Richard Stallman, check it out:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/need-free-digital-hardware-designs/
I am quite surprised that RMS wrote something about free hardware. Previously he stated that free hardware is a bit too much for him (not that it is a wrong thing, but we have to solve our problem with software first). Also, in one of his talks he pointed out that free software principles cannot be applied to hardware, and even said that it is a dumb thing to try to do so. And there is an article On “Free Hardware” (1999, by Richard Stallman) where he expressed some doubts about free hardware.
It is great to know that these things are being rethought. Perhaps the latest success of 3D printers makes us all understand that it is not too hard to share the design of something. However, I believe that free hardware is mostly about electronic devices and not 3D-printed solid objects in first place. That is, schematics and PCB layouts (and also firmware, but that's on the free software side).
So I want to make free hardware, how can I do that?
Luckily there is a plenty of software to help you with that.
Try Kicad! Works so great for schematics and PCB layouts. You can put your project files into git and it will work just fine. Don't expect complex merges to work (although they sometimes do). Most importantly, such approach allows working on the same project in a team, and you also get a history of every change since the beginning without too much of an overhead. Git is so great at storing the source code and since Kicad is using plain text files, the whole thing just works (although I have a feeling that it was not intended to be used with git).
We've been doing this for quite some time and we are pretty much satisfied. I know, it is a bit tricky for electronics engineers to get into git (since they are not programmers in the first place), but I believe that it pays off in a long run.
Thanks, Richard Stallman!
Previously it felt like doing free hardware is something weird. Hopefully it will get more natural after this article.
Here is our thumb up:
See also a blog post by Olimex: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/open-source-hardware-oshw-why-it-matters-and-what-is-pseudo-oshw/
List of lists of free hardware projects
It is such a pity that there is no unified list of free hardware projects. Let's list some of the lists:
- http://www.ohwr.org/projects – this list is messy. ohwr.org is more like a github for free hardware (each project includes git repo, wiki and other stuff).
- http://www.opencircuits.com/Projects – even messier list, but a really long one.
- http://opensourceecology.org/ – this is a separate project by itself, but it aims to create a “set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist”.
- Wikipedia:List_of_open-source_hardware_projects – lists only the biggest projects.
- Wikipedia:Open-source_computing_hardware – another list on Wikipedia.
- Free Hardware on GitHub – you can also use search function to find free hardware projects.
- Open-Source Hardware on GitHub – same thing, but for projects that don't have freedom as one of their goals.