Archived Forum

In open source technology

Openness is the focus value

And the result of this simple action gives rise to whole range of important benefits. From learning, the empowerment that comes from learning, the ability to build upon others work, the resultant innovation. Collaboration and community.

Openness actually recognises the nature of innovation as building upon others' work, it frees us to attribute others work fully and to collaborate when the opportunity arises.

It is a better way of doing things because it is a way in which we can all get involved in developing and making technology, creating technology that helps us live our lives better.

Another value based technology movement is the sustainable technology movement where environmental sustainability and often more specifically low carbon is the focus value.

Like open source, low carbon or sustainable technology has a strong single value which provides a clear way of assessing whether a particular technology is better or worse.

Taking the open source approach to sustainable technology gives us the best of both worlds.

In this project we are developing a fully open source hardware and software energy monitoring platform which is one of the fundamental technologies needed in the open source sustainable technology ecosystem.

Core

Arduino - the project that laid the key foundation to the open hardware movement? The Arduino microcontroller platform can now be found at the heart of almost all open hardware projects including this project.

Jeelabs - A lot of our hardware and firmware is built upon the work of Jean Claud Wippler of jeelabs. The EtherShield library and the use of rfm12 wireless transceiver in particular. Jeelabs hardware and software is in turn, built upon the Arduino platform.

 Sustainability

• GEK Gasifier - open source wood gasification and electricity generation system.
• Onawi - open medium size wind turbine project.
• AbelMon
• The free charge controller project
• Scoraig Wind - How to build your own wind turbine, a great project.
• Appropedia - a very active open source sustainability wiki.

Manufacturing / Production

• Reprap - the first open source 3d printing project which has inspired many others.

• Lasersaur - an open source laser cutter.
• Open Source Ecology - A visionary project to develop the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Transportation

• Wikispeed
• Local Motors
• 40 fires / Riversimple

Open Projects, Kits and Learning

• Adafruit - are a really inspiring New York based open hardware company that are a really big support to the open hardware community, with learning resources, excellent kits and many useful software libraries.
• Make magazine and the maker faires - a big source of support and inspiration for the open hardware/maker movement.
• Dangerous prototypes