94 January & February 2021 http://www.elektormagazine.com
Open-source hardware (OSH) is hardware whose design is made publicly
available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell
the design or hardware based on that design [1]. To understand the
benefits of open hardware, we would have to change our perspective
on technology, says Lukas Schattenhofer. “For most people, technology
is currently something you consume rather than build and maintain. If a
component of their phone breaks, they buy a new one instead of fixing
it. Today, most technology is closed. That means that the information
you need to make repairs isn’t accessible. But if all the documentation
is available, you wouldn’t need to buy a new phone every two years.
You would be able to repair it and even build it. Also, it would change
the way products are designed. They would become more modular so
you can swap out parts and combine products with each other.”
“Documentation is the source”
But even though there is a thriving open hardware community, OSH
is still much less known than its counterpart open-source software.
The Open Hardware Observatory (OHO) aims to make OSH more
visible by providing an online repository of open projects [2]. To
do so, OHO has created a search engine that crawls the web for
projects. These are listed with photos and a short description. But
not all the projects in the repository are truly open. That is where
the second branch of OHO comes in — the assessment platform.
It helps makers present their project in such a way that it complies
with the standards for OSH.
There are two main criteria for a project to be open. First, there are
the licenses. Code or firmware is automatically copyrighted. If a maker
includes software in their project, they must actively assign it an open
license like the Gnu General Public License or the MIT license [3].
Product documentation, especially when it is extensive, often falls
under copyright law too. Not all makers are aware they have to explicitly
assign an open license to enable downstream users to legally re-use
the code or distribute the documentation.The second criterion concerns the documentation. Schattenhofer:
“Documentation is important. OSH is about enabling people to study,
modify and make the hardware. And for that you need the designs.
You can’t download the source code as you do with software. With
hardware, the documentation is the source.”Therefore, documentation needs to be in compliance with a minimal
set of requirements. An enthusiastic maker who’s uploaded a Youtube
video of their DIY drip irrigation system probably wants to share it. But
if the video lacks the information needed to reproduce the project, it
isn’t really open source.Documentation assessment platform
Schattenhofer and the team are currently working on the assess-
ment platform. The review process works as follows. An applicant
uploads a project. Three reviewers assess the documentation. They
can add comments to point out which parts are missing or should be
improved. When the documentation meets all the requirements, the
project receives an attestation.The requirements for the documentation are laid down in DIN SPEC- This is a Publicly Available Specification submitted to DIN, the
German standards body. It specifies concrete measurable criteria for
OSH compliant documentation. The specification is itself the result
of a collaborative process of the OSH community. And in accordance
with open source principles, anyone can contribute to the further
development of DIN SPEC 3105 via the Gitlab page [4].
The Open Hardware
Observatory
Community-Based Open Source Hardware Assessment
By Tessel Renzenbrink (The Netherlands)
The Open Hardware Observatory is an initiative that aims to make open hardware more
accessible. It provides a search engine to help you find open hardware projects published
anywhere on the web. And it is currently developing a community-based platform for
reviewing open source hardware documentation based on DIN SPEC 3105. The Observatory
is being developed by a group of people from Open Source Ecology Germany e.V. and TU
Berlin. Lukas Schattenhofer — together with Consuelo Alberca Susano, Mehrdad Mansouri,
and Nils Weiher — is currently working on the community around the Observatory.
Schattenhofer explains how it works and invites Elektor readers to join the community.
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