Open Source Hardware Rises
We are living in exponential exciting times!
As everyone knows, IoT (internet of things) is one of the next big thing and this revolution is happening right now!
Well, I know… it’s not really true, this revolution is happening for a while but today the market is more than ready: it’s hackable.
Reminder, what is IoT?
The idea is pretty simple: bring internet to the physical world.
To understand the whole concept, we generally split IoT into 3 parts surrounding data:
- Acquisition —. acquire real world information and produce data.
- Transport —. connect all intelligent devices with wireless networks.
- Analyse —. inspect and transform all collected data.
And… that’s it, nothing else! #iziiii
Well, if you understand the concept and love the idea of connecting things without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction, your job is to disrupt every imaginable sectors like area, energy, transport, healthcare, agriculture and so forth… but how to get started?
I’ll not focus on data transport and analyse here, you can see what’s going on in theses sectors by following wireless services announcement like Sigfox, LoRa or LTE-M network and with interesting big data, analytics and management products like AirVantage, AWS IoT or Google Cloud IoT.
What is really exciting for me now is how hardware and data acquisition is evolving.
Open Hardware lover
Playing with hardware is pretty cool but for entrepreneurs with ideas there is what I called the Dark Side of the Innovation, i.e. complex hardware accessibility.
In fact, by its philosophy, open source hardware is changing the game by following the open foundations below:
- Features and technical specifications
Processors, micro-controllers, drivers and operating system must be open.
- License
The open license must be business-friendly and must allow anybody to easily build, modify, re-use or share new products.
- Documentation
There is no technical adoption without [really] good documentation and development environment. In hardware we still need to improve that part and Stripe or Algolia documentations are very good software study cases.
- Community
From hardware prototyping to business through application development, IoT require plenty of skills and we can see that the current community of makers do great jobs to share knowledge and create hardware cohesion.
For a while, some existing open hardware like Arduino or Raspberry Pi the most well-known examples get along with some of this strength and allow engineers, students or teachers to play with data for educational needs, discovery, proof of concept or just for fun but it was somehow difficult to start scalable businesses.
Besides that, it has never been so easy to learn/use technologies and bootstrap startups…
Something was missing but what?
Fast prototyping and industrialization
I’m an Arduino and RaspberryPi lover but it will be very sad to only focus on theses 2 platforms because new kind of fully interesting open source hardware are available for IoT, even better, industrial-grade products can be easily create with it and that will allow creative people and entrepreneur to take their chance by prototyping and release their own connected product very quickly. You can for example take a look at the following sexy platforms: mangoh or siFive.
Open-hardware diversity is one of the main purpose of our existence and we are going to share with you 3 simple things: discovery, news and samples.
Next
Nobody can deny that open source software culture had and continue to have a huge impact on the digital world around us, you’ll see that open source hardware will have the same or an even greater impact!
Hardware programming is easy, trust me.
Let’s Rock! 🤓❤️
