Topic: Open Source microcontroller board

[Nemesis]

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That’s because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They’re not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buy an open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIA has just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design, fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.

They use a license similar to the GPL whereby if you produce derivatives of it the designs must be under the same license.

Want to join the world of Arduino developers? Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson already has, designing two Arduino-based autopilots for unmanned model aircraft: ArduPilot and BlimpDuino (you can find them at diydrones.com). Here’s his formula for getting your creation out and into the world.

1 Download the Arduino schematic and circuit board files from arduino .cc. Use the free version of CadSoft Eagle (from cadsoft.de) to modify them for your particular creation.

2 Upload your files to a board fabricator like BatchPCB. Your boards will be manufactured in Chinese robotic-electronics factories and sent to your house. Typical cost is $10 each.

3 Order bulk electronic parts from digikey .com and solder the components onto the board to make a prototype. Test the board and your code. You’re ready to distribute your gizmo to the masses!

4 If you want to produce and sell the product yourself, use a manufacturing service like Screaming Circuits to assemble the boards on robotic pick-and-place soldering machines.

5 Alternately, an open source hardware specialist like SparkFun or Adafruit can make and sell the product for you. They’ll add a profit margin and pay you a license fee .

6 Publish your revised schematics and circuit board files so that others can modify them. The cycle begins again.

[Bonk]

Interesting... I was just thinking about open source data acquisition software, as it is ideal for regulatory compliance (EPA, FDA, CFRs, etc...) as it can actually be validated. I truly believe that open source software is the future of GLP regulatory science. I wonder could I teach this thing to handle various autosamplers (Agilent, Varian, Waters, Perkin Elmer etc...)?

[Bonk]

A good artilce on a number of their other products and similar products:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/_draft_open_source_hardwa.html
... makes me want to dig out the old scope and breadboard again!

I can't wait till I can retire and totally geek out on this kind of stuff.