The New Shop Class by Joan Horvath & Rich Cameron

Author:Joan Horvath & Rich Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

Open Hardware

Source code for software is all digital information, and the only thing you need in order to use it, aside from the computer, is more software. Figuring out how to create open source hardware, such as an Arduino board (Chapter 2) or a 3D printer (Chapter 3), posed more difficult problems because you could not turn digital zeroes and ones into physical objects—at least, not until recently.

Digital manufacturing devices such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC mills use files similar to a program’s source code to create physical things. This means that people can share designs for physical things that don’t take a master craftsman to reproduce on the other end. It’s still not as easy as just pushing a button (see Chapter 3 on 3D printing), but it’s accessible enough for a global open source community of hardware developers to have formed.

Another crucial innovation was software for designing physical objects. Computer-aided design (CAD) software has been around since the 70s and has been used for virtually all mechanical, product, and architectural design for years, but these programs traditionally cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. In recent years, a plethora of free CAD programs have become available, many of them open source software. My personal favorite is OpenSCAD ( www.openscad.org ), which actually uses source code that looks very much like software code to describe objects.

Recently, the design of open source physical objects has become popular in two major categories. First, there is the design of Arduinos, 3D printers, and the other platforms we have talked about in this book already. Secondly, there are the designs of things meant to be made by using 3D printers and other digitally controlled manufacturing machines. But figuring out who has the right to make what can get pretty complicated, as I will get into next.

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