The Definitive Guide to Open Source Hardware - 2008

Again this year MAKE Magazine blog has publishes the annual Open Source Hardware Guide listing no less than 60 open source hardware projects, ranging from simple microcontroller boards to a fully functional cell phone. Open source hardware are projects where the designers have decided to publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files necessary to recreate the hardware. The open source licensing allows any use, including commercial.

In many cases you really wouldn't care about the schematics for your cell phone; however, when designing and building complex systems it is a priceless advantage to have the design and the schematics of the individual components at your disposal. You can avoid many surprises during integration since you have a chance to find out exactly what you are buying instead of just getting a black box which may or may not live up to your expectations (lets face it, there always a huge gap between what a sales department advertises and what the technical department delivers). Moreover, you have the freedom to use the hardware you bought the way you want to and not the way the manufacturer wants you to. And you don't risk being sued just because you opened up the box to look at what's under the hood.

Hopefully, it will not take many years before we will see complete space systems on the list :-)

Daisy MP3 player - An open source MP3 player

The Neo FreeRunner open source cell phone.

Article about Team FREDNET and Elphel Inc

A very nice article about the open source and open minded partnership between Team FREDNET and Elphel Inc has just appeared on linuxDevices.com. The article was written by Anders Feder who is a very active member of Team FREDNET and also maintains his own blog called Open Space Exploration Journal.

As the article points out, it is an interesting coincidence (?) that Elphel cameras were also used for the virtual Google Books library and the Google Street View service - and now also in the Google Lunar X PRIZE :-)

The Sky on the Moon

We had some discussions on our public forum recently about using the stars and the planets for guidance and navigation on the lunar surface. Of course, it raises the question of how the sky looks like on the Moon? To find out, I took a virtual trip to the Apollo 11, 15 and Surveyor 7 landing sites using the free open source Stellarium software. Stellarium is a complete planetarium software for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It even allows you to look at the sky from surface of other planets and moons.

Other free software used in producing this video was the Gimp for image manipulations and Kdenlive for non-linear video editing. Thus, the video was created using only free open source software including the OS, which was Ubuntu linux.

You can also watch the video in higher resolution on the YouTube page.

PS: I have hidden a small error in the first 20 seconds of the video, and I am not thinking about the lunar landscape. The first person to identify this error will receive a free Team FREDNET mission patch :-)