 So I guess it's a 510. Can everybody hear me? Because this is a little on the routine. Feels like it's on the loud side. It is a mostly repeat of the presentation I did in San Diego, but with new content. So for those of you who may have seen this at ELC, I'm mostly going over about 80% of the same stuff. So if there's another talk that you would love to go see instead, by all means, I will not feel offended. But yes, my name is John Hawley, also known as Warthog9, and I'm going to be talking on open source hardware. So I guess the first question I should ask everybody is, who thinks they know what open source hardware is? Wow. Did you guys just come to this talk to learn everything? That is actually the lowest number of hands I've ever seen when I've asked that question. So I'm not sure whether I should be scared and that this is going to go really, really poorly, or whether this is going to be awesome. You guys are all going to learn a lot. So I guess I should actually define what open source hardware is. So this will go well. Specifically, open source hardware, I am using the Oshawa open source hardware association 1.0's definition of what open source hardware is. There are many definitions out there, and a bunch of them are all weirdly conflicting, and it's really kind of obnoxious. But this is the one I'm going with. So open source hardware 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. So I'll let that sink in for a minute. This probably sounds very similar to a lot of licenses we're all used to dealing with on a daily basis, things like the GPL, the BSD, those kinds of things. And when you think about it, well, open source hardware more or less just comes out of the idea of open source software, which more or less comes out of the idea that this was all open long ago, why did we ever make it proprietary in the first place? Which is kind of where ESR, or not ESR, RMS came up with open source software in the first place. But I've told you what open source hardware is, but let me show you what some open source hardware actually looks like. And so we've got probably the granddaddy of all the open source hardware boards, the Arduino, which really is like one of the first open source hardware boards out there, really kind of kickstarted the entire resurgence of everybody wanting to share their hardware, how they deal with it, and how they can mix it, match it, make it do what they want. And it's just a microcontroller. There's not a lot going on here. It's just a simple microcontroller. And as we kind of go up the stack here a little bit, you've got things like the Intel Galileo, which is not quite a microcontroller, but not quite an entire PC, all the way up through things like the Beagle board, the middle board turbo, and a bunch of the boards from a company called Olimax. These are all, everything including the Galileo, other than the Arduino here, is actually full blown computers. These are general purpose computers. They've got RAM, they've got full real system on chips, attach them, and they're all kind of in the small board computer arena. And one of the big reasons for that is that when you're making an open source hardware platform, you're making it to solve your own itches, because we all make software that solves our own itches, right? Well, same basic problem. And so you get these boards, they're out there. And what this means is that all of these boards, you can go and you can grab the schematics, you can grab the Gerbers, you can grab the source code that gets them up and running, and you can download all of this and start playing with it. So if you wanted to take an Arduino or an Intel Galileo, or any of these boards, you can go grab all of this collateral and just start mashing around on it, trying to change things. Maybe you don't want the gigabit ethernet that's on the middle board or the 10100 ethernet that's on the Beagle board, delete, because delete's really, really easy and hardware. Surprisingly, adding things is really, really hard. I don't know. But it also gives you references and all that kind of jazz. But one of the things I also wanted to point out is, well, I'm going to talk a lot about the computers and whatnot, and things like the Arduino. There's a lot of open source hardware out there that doesn't have anything more than basic hardware. And there's this company called Little Bit, and they make these little click-together modules that have some really strong magnets in them. So you can actually just start playing with circuits. So it's like an even more, please don't fry things and let the magic blue smoke out, friendly version of breadboarding. Because everybody's built a breadboard here, right? Everybody knows what a breadboard is, right? Raise your hand if you don't know what a breadboard is. You are here to do nothing but troll me anyway, so I'm going to ignore you. Yes, it is what you cut your bread on. Chop, chop, chop, chop. Just don't let the magic blue smoke out of the bread. That's usually called penicillin. And you probably have lit it on fire or something. I don't know. This kind of gives you an overview of what is open source hardware, what the definition is, and I want to take a couple of seconds to throw out some random questions and we'll see if you guys actually know your hardware very well. So there's this wonderful board, you might have heard of it, it's called the Raspberry Pi. Who wants to claim it's open source hardware? Oh, I love you all. Thank you. Except for you, I still hate you. For those on the recording, this is Pidge. Pidge and I have a long standing agreement that whoever has a talk, we go to that talk and then we do nothing but troll them in the talk. Yeah, I'm the one giving a talk, so I'm the one getting trolled today. You have not... Liar. But no, I thank you for that because there are so many people who get confused on that particular platform, it's not open source hardware. They give out, I believe you can get at some of the schematics, but you can't actually get at the Gerbers, you can't really remix it for your own purposes. Which is really great to see that you all seem to know that. That's actually really quite nice. Let's see, what other platform would be interesting to ask you about? Actually, that's probably the only one I really wanted to quiz you on, so let's keep going. So last Friday, this talk's actually really, really relevant. Surprisingly, last Friday the open source hardware association did its annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. And so this information's only like four or five days old. But they announced, one of the big things that's happened in the open source hardware world in the last year, literally, is the open source hardware association came out with a full certification process for open source hardware. And they discussed this last year at their meeting in Philadelphia, and what it was going to entail, roughly at that time anyway, and how it was going to go. And this year, at the open source hardware association meeting, they actually published the certification and how it was all going to work. And briefly overview, and thankfully this is not a hugely long certification, it's a self-certification. So basically what they're depending on is that if you believe your platform is open source hardware and should receive this particular logo, they're more or less going to take you at your word. So if you believe that you actually put your platform out there to meet the open source hardware guidelines, so it's out there, you can download it, you can modify it, recreate it, sell it, those kinds of things, going back to that original definition, if you believe you meet all of that, you can apply to get the logo. And more or less, this gives you the logo, you get a unique number for your design, and they really are trying to limit it to your design. So if I was to take a board, let's just go with an example here, of a PCB that is designed for blimp control. And I was to take this open source hardware design that let's just say that somebody in this room may have made. And I was to modify it so that it actually controlled a small robotic dog. I would be required, or I'm not required, but I am requested very strongly to go ahead and go and get a new ID number, so that the board that I've made is actually unique in comparison to this other board. More or less, that means that if there's problems with the original board, they go after the original author who submitted their identification. If there's a problem with the board I would make, they come and they talk to me. So for the people at home, if the board that controlled the dog caught on fire, as opposed to the one that was used in a blimp, they would have to come and talk to me. But catching on fire is not exactly an open source hardware problem. So this is the first version of the license. A number of people have actually asked me what I think of it. This is where I go out and I stand on my own opinion. This is nothing but my own. I've read the standard, it's actually really simple and I actually agree with it. But if you violate it, they come after you. If you don't violate it, you're pretty much, it's really no different than taking the open source hardware logo that we currently have and slapping it on your board. But with this, you actually get a small amount more of reassurance that somebody is actually policing this if there are problems. And so I actually very strongly agree with this particular definition and I think a lot more of the things that I personally am going to be putting out, I will be going and getting this certification and whatnot. If you're interested, go out to the open source hardware association's website, they've got a big old link right on the front page right now, which is oshwa.org, if I remember correctly. And you can go read this, I actually recommend going and doing it if you're doing anything in hardware. Which actually I guess that leads to an interesting question. How many of you are actually building hardware? How many of you would like to build hardware? How many of you are very scared of hardware and wish it would catch on fire? So there you go. Yes. So yes, there is a registry. So what happens is when you want to certify your product and when I say certify, I'm using their definition of certify because they do no checking of whether, oh am I getting, oh, this is what happens when I don't pay attention to the laptop. All that you do to get your number is basically you email them and say, I have this product, here's my information and they just send you a number back. What I understand to be their intention, I don't know if anybody's actually gone through this and gotten a number yet, but I'm sure that several people have already emailed them to do this. What happens is if they get a complaint, then they go back and review what you've done to make sure that you are actually complying. And when you go to get this, you're basically agreeing to them that if I screw up and I'm not actually in compliance, you may assess damages of either yelling at me and or monetary, I must pay you to continue to keep this certification as well as resolving the issue that may be being brought up. So I know that there's a few people who have claimed that why would you sign up because all you're doing is opening yourself up to complaints. But frankly, having this means that it's much simpler to go if there is a problem with your board or not being open source hard, actually being open source hardware, it gives you a mechanism to actually go back and say, you're not. And please either become open source hardware or drop the logo, which is which is something you don't have with the the existing open source hardware logo, because anybody can just grab it and use it and there's no there's no trademark or licensing associated with the other logo. So it's just kind of out there. So some other things that came out of the open source hardware meeting, that was the big one. The rest of the stuff is actually way more fun. One of the things that came out of it is that open source hardware is really starting to make its way into the medical field. If anybody's ever seen the medical field, this is actually an area where technology can help people a lot. But people are very technology averse here, because there's so much regulation that normally goes into a piece of hardware to get basic approval to even try something. Well, the gentleman on the right gave a talk about how he's using a lot of this technology in India to do exploratory information on how to better give treatment. So they used a platform where they hooked up sensors to surgeon's fingers to figure out how much pressure they were putting on to sutures in certain procedures because life expectancy was actually directly correlated to how much if you put too much or too little pressure on this particular suture, you killed the patient literally. So they were recording that information so they could go back and actually teach new doctors by measuring their own pressure, whether they would be saving the patient's life or killing them. As well as several other places where they're using open hardware, and they're making all of this available because they want to not only use it for their own purposes, but they want to share it because obviously if you can measure something and then help someone learn from it, the suturing technique here, you're just going to do nothing but save more lives. And the amount of hardware they're using is less than $100 worth of gear. So there's nothing that really should be stopping anybody from doing this. And they were talking about the success story they had there. They also had a great talk from the EXII HackBerry guys about a 3D printable prosthetic and where that's going in their world and the kinds of things that people are doing with it. And so that open source prosthetics, a lot of medical stuff's really coming up in the open source hardware world, which this is substantially grown since last year. There was one talk last year. There were two and a half, three talks this year that focused on nothing but medical with respect to open source hardware. So if you want to start playing in the open source hardware world, start paying attention to some of the medical stuff. And Tracy's got her hand up in the back. You may add anything you want. I'm just going to have to repeat it. So to regurgitate what Tracy has just suggested is one of the things that this is really helping with is kids. Kids grow so fast and normal prosthetics are so expensive that more or less kids don't get access to the prosthetics because each one of these in the traditional sense is thousands of dollars. And if the kid's going to outgrow it in six months, well, people don't want to outlay that constantly. And what this is doing is that it's giving people the ability to make a more modular system. And when the kid outgrows just the hookup, they can replace just the hookup with a slightly bigger one, and you get longer longevity out of the rest of the pieces as well as being able to more specifically customize it to individuals. Because not every reason why you would need a prosthetic is identical. So you may have to customize it dramatically more and they're able to do that. So great talk from the EXII HackBerry guys on that. And there were two other spaces where open source hardware was being discussed that really hasn't come up a whole lot lately on the, I guess on your left, on my right. There was a talk from the National Park Service in the United States about how they're actually picking up open source hardware and using it more and more for two simple reasons. One, it lowers their cost of putting together demos and interactive exhibits, as well as two, it allows them to set these things up for themselves and then be able to share that with other national parks or museums and whatnot. And it's building a much greater ecosystem where pieces, a single entity can do a lot of development work and allow a lot of other places to pick this up. And so they gave a great talk on how they're using some open source hardware stuff and what they were doing with it and the number of national parks that are starting to pick that kind of stuff up. As well as who wants to go to space? Who wants to send things to space? Who wants to possibly want to send things to space but instead they explode on the launch pad? Okay, so you're Elon Musk. Oh, you just want to see me. The Portland Aerospace Society actually gave a great talk about how they believe that not only are they the first ones to have sent a Linux box into space, which I can test actually. I will actually contest their claim. So I'm sorry Portland Aerospace guys. I'm pretty sure I had no prior art to that one. But how they're actually sharing their information with three other universities right now to have a, and I'm going to put this in quote, a race to see which of these three universities can actually get an amateur rocket into orbit. Into orbit where it will actually stay in orbit, not like low earth orbit or anything, but no like satellite level orbits. And so they were describing a lot of the systems and software that they've been using and how they've started collaborating. So again, we're starting to see open source hardware permeating outside of what we would normally expect. Where you'd normally expect to see it and it's starting to get into spaces that I honestly wouldn't have expected to get to yet. But kind of drifting away from the open source hardware associations meeting. One of the other big things that's come up in the last couple of weeks from an open source hardware perspective is Arduino is no longer two different entities. They have finally reconciled there is one Arduino again. So everybody who hasn't genuino, take it out of your project, put it on a shelf somewhere because in like 20 years it'll actually be worth money. And then go buy a real Arduino again. But so that's actually relatively big news. If you aren't familiar with the controversy, it all boiled down to some trademark issues and a manufacturer and Massimo basically ended up splitting ways for about a almost two years I guess. They've now since reconciled that and they had a great announcement where they were both on stage at the New York Maker Fair a couple weeks ago. So there was that. And let's see what else there is interesting to talk about. So also in the last year, how many people have heard of the little small board computer called Chip? How many of you backed it on Kickstarter? Well actually that's a pretty good number. Chip is a very small board computer. It's about yay big so about I don't know what three inches square give or take for those of you who have actually gotten your chip. It's a nine dollar computer. And I say computer with a little bit of trepidation because it's barely better than a microcontroller. But it has just enough of the pieces to make it a real computer. But they raised a Kickstarter about a year and a half ago for about two million dollars to build these things. And they've actually been one of the poster children for open source hardware. They've gone so far as they've released all their bomb, their Gerbers, their schematics. They are a fantastic example of just open source hardware because they've done all of that. And on top of that they've actually gone so far as to try and keep costs down. They've actually gone and pioneered new techniques into dealing with the hardware they've got. So like they've got MMC on their board but they have no EMMC controller specifically. They're doing all of their EMMC controller functions in the main CPU itself. And this is actually saving them money because they no longer have to pay the cost to deal with the MMC controller. And they've done several things along those lines specifically to get the price of this hardware down. So they're actually pioneering this not only for themselves but to get this for everybody else. Yep. I'm sorry. It's not so much a warning that the hardware is messed up. It's a warning that software is now good enough to take over certain aspects of what the hardware was doing. Same basic example if you look at RAID controllers. Many, many years ago RAID controllers were the only way to get really fast high speed throughput on storage. Nowadays if you want the fastest throughput for your storage you use software RAID. Because your main CPU is exponentially faster than any hardware RAID card on the market. And it's also thousands of dollars cheaper. That being said for the record I actually still run hardware RAID on all of my co-load boxes. And so there are reasons to continue with the old hardware. But this is you know what the chip guys are doing is mostly pioneering. If you're trying to get to the lowest cost board they're trying to take as many pieces of the hardware equation out because each piece of hardware just costs you money. And if you've already got a main CPU well try and push more of the functionality there. If you want to think about it this is like the wind modem of EMMC. Except that's a really horrible analogy because you'll all instantly hate it. Yes it's much more like a wind modem or a parallel port that you've literally just bit back. But they're actually seeing really good performance off of it. And they've done it in the open so it's not a wind modem. And this is a little bit older news but still definitely interesting is about a year ago actually no about earlier it was earlier this year just before the embedded Linux conference in San Diego Google signed on to the open compute project which how many people here have actually heard of the open compute project anybody okay a few of you. What this is it's a consortium of groups that are building gigantic data centers Facebook Google now obviously and I'm going to forget who else is involved in it I know it's Google and Facebook for sure but they're specifically designing hardware open hardware to share amongst a big data centers to try and cut down on power usage get better thermal performance and to cut out any piece in the entire equation that could draw extra power that's not needed. I mean how many people have you have actually looked at the servers that they're deploying and possibly seen a sound card on it okay that's actually better than I I'm glad none of you have seen that I have. And for a while there there was software requirements to put sound cards into servers because this totally makes doesn't make any sense but it was still done for a while. But you know basically what these big you know entities Facebook Google are finding is that anything extra that's been added to a server in any way not only cost them money but will sit their idle and possibly vampire power off the system which if you've got a piece of hardware that's embedded into several thousand computers and each one of them is now drawing you know we'll just call it a milliamp a single milliamp you're now drawing a thousand milliamps of power that's literally doing nothing but generating heat. So you're now also generating electricity to eradicate the heat through cooling and it just kind of snowballs very quickly and what the open compute project is obviously trying to do is they're all trying to share their knowledge build hardware switches servers so that they can kind of cut down on those kinds of things and Google joined the open compute project earlier this year and Kickstarter if anybody's ever you know backed anything on Kickstarter open source hardware is popping up all over the place on Kickstarter and this is kind of unsurprising because Kickstarter is really great for kick starting your project and there's a lot of people who want to go and build on existing open source hardware platforms Beaglebone Minnow board Arduino Arduino is huge off of Kickstarter and so there's a lot of success stories there's a lot of failures that are coming up on Kickstarter but if you're ever wanting to kind of get in on the ground floor of open source hardware go go poke around on Kickstarter and see what what's actually going on there they have an entire section dedicated to open hardware and it's not just you know small board computers or things like the the chip there's a lot of other things that are going on there too so I'm kind of slowly running out of time here but quick overview of kind of where we're at and where we're going open source hardware adoption and creation is accelerating this is unsurprising it's following almost the exact same trajectory that open source software followed in its infancy and it I mean we're literally just seeing that in open hardware now low speed designs so things that don't need differential pair routing or anything like that people are doing them all over the place so Arduino based designs things that hook up to spy i2c pretty much anything in the iot space people are really starting to take a look at open source hardware and software if they aren't already and in fact there's a a lot of people starting to advocate me included that if you're doing an iot design please start thinking about being open with it up front because at some point you're going to want to ditch that design and if you've ditched it and stopped supporting it this is what happened this is how we get to iot distributed deniable service attacks because no one's maintaining it and so you've got that going now and higher speed designs so things that use pc express or anything with differential routing they're still continuing so but obviously at a slower pace they're much harder to to do for the normal human being the the tools aren't quite as good although design tools like key cat now have differential pair automatic routing but key cat in the general sense excuse me is still complicated to use and it's not it's not super user friendly so at this point i've got about 10 minutes and i will answer anything on open hardware in my next talk i'll literally answer anything but that's downstairs so how many how many people think that they actually have a vague idea of what open source hardware is now okay is there anything you're confused on in that space you don't get to ask any questions anymore um somebody's got to have a question okay so uh the question is is um a couple of years ago there was initiative to kind of push for open source graphics cards is are those included in here yes um my understanding is that they're still working on it but i haven't seen any big exciting news from them lately um so they're not a whole lot interesting to talk about i know that they're still working on it um last i saw um and this is a while ago so my my information is outdated um they had gotten it uh working on an fp a large fpga board and had done some prototyping there um there are some other things that uh similarly come out uh in the last couple of weeks not on the graphics card side but they're where various companies or various entities not companies are um have done uh chip design chip designs for other purposes where they specifically wire bonded it to pcbs and they've had some pretty interesting success on that in the last couple of weeks so the the open source graphics card stuff last i heard is still ongoing but again i just haven't seen anything lately my understanding is that it's the chip itself uh oh oh so far yes yeah so somebody else had a question actually you don't have an open source hardware yep but i haven't used kick out lately um so yeah so the the um question is or question or comment kind of combination of the two um is that it's pretty much a company wide decision on what CAD software you're going to use to design pcbs i mean key cad's nice but you're right if a company has decided on altium you know in all likelihood you're going to meet the path of least resistance to try and do your hardware design in altium um generally speaking the open source hardware association is okay with that and most people in the open source hardware hardware world will understand it but it's a decision that you're going to have to be that you i would recommend pushing against for the simple fact that trying to get an altium license in particular i believe seats start at ten thousand dollars if somebody's got better a better idea on the pricing my understanding it's somewhere in the the ten thousand dollar range at least in the back of my head um which means that if you're if you really want somebody else to be able to come and pick up your design and change it and modify it now you're talking about them needing a ten thousand dollar chunk of software to do it um that being said there are some commercial solutions out there that are generally more friendly to the open source hardware world eagle um being the obvious choice key cad because it's completely open source um but uh and there's a few other niche um and smaller some open source some not uh design tools there but i mean things like uh even the minnow board which is an open source hardware platform uh the only way to get at the actual files for that are other than the gerbers because anybody can read gerbers which is nice um i think the original design um was done in or cad it's been ported to um uh mentor graphics uh tool suite and i believe somebody the other day was talking to me that it's being ported to another design suite but you know all three of these design suites are the big expensive ones unfortunately but it's also a 10-layer board it has a lot of high-speed routing on it and just it's not something that eagle specifically could handle well and trying to get it ported over to key cad probably be a bit of a nightmare um not that it's not doable it's just the tool doesn't handle that kind of complexity as well so i i don't know if i've exactly answered your question yeah correct and i think right now i mean if you're going to design like a little arduino board in altium i think people will laugh at you because that's like trying to use a nuclear hand grenade to just want to fly um but um but when you're doing some of the bigger designs things like um uh the olimax boards or something like the minnow board you know you're just going to end up in that kind of space anyway but uh i do know that the beagle board black or not beagle board black with the new chip that they've got um they've ported it over to eagle with a six-layer board um and uh i think they've got a six-layer design and a four-layer design uh done an eagle so it is possible things are getting better so yep yep okay so for the folks at home um a comment in addition was that olimax has switched over to doing key cad exclusively um and that they've got new designs particularly with some like all winner 64-bit chips that are in the works right now so yep yeah the workflow and the ui is basically the the big problem in key cat at this point but um to restate what you just said was that uh olimax is actually going in and supporting key cad development and that key cad's basically getting a lot better i mean there's a lot of companies and entities um cern specifically uh added the differential pair routing stuff the push-pull automatic routing into key cad so i will actually take your question yes yep yep okay um so let's see if i've got a good summary on that is that when large companies or any company puts out an iot device or a consumer electronic device um am i are we starting to see with the now larger failures and i'm going to put fail it's not exactly a failure but the larger departure or abandonment of that product um uh are we starting to see those kinds of abandonment actually push people towards wanting to do open hardware or even or even to to try and get the larger consumer entities that when they do the abandonment chuck everything over the fence um i would argue yes um there's a growing uh rather vocal um group of people again me included on that particular front um advocating that when you do abandon these kinds of things just chuck the stuff over the fence because at least i mean there there are i can't imagine that there's anyone in this room that doesn't have some piece of hardware in their house doing something that they actually care a great deal about that the company is either out of business the product line has um you know it doesn't matter um uh the product line was discontinued or something raise your hand if everything in your house is fully supported by the manufacturer no okay fine i she doesn't count is because i i can think of at least a dozen different devices in my own house my ip cameras my music system which is based on uh squeeze box uh which logitech promptly dropped the um hardware support for uh you know just there's a plethora of different devices in in i think any of our houses and with the the advent of iot which is great you know we're getting all the this new functionality into these devices but what happens when samsung or um lg or any of these companies stop pushing updates to their tvs or their washing machines or their thermostats which is what uh uh beth was referring to um what happens when all of this happens well now you've got this really nice brick or this really great platform for ddos for hackers so anyone else bealer well i thank you for coming uh there's a minnowboard boff that's going to be downstairs in five or ten minutes um i know that the yachto table is doing another giveaway just before their boff and with that i wish you the uh a great conference