Gibb - Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers

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DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers

Alicia Gibb

with

Steven Abadie
Ed Baafi
Matt Bolton
Kipp Bradford
Gabriella Levine
David A. Mellis
Catarina Mota
Joshua Pearce
Becky Stern
Tiffany Tseng
Addie Wagenknecht
Michael Weinberg
Amanda Wozniak
Lars Zimmerman

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952506

Copyright 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

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All rights to the anecdotes, appendixes, and are held by the authors.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-90604-5
ISBN-10: 0-321-90604-7

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana. First printing, December 2014

Dedicated to Aaron Swartz, a friend, a mentor,
and the greatest teacher of open source.

Building Open Source Hardware is an anthology written to get users and makers of open source hardware to the next step of developing for the masses and manufacturing. This book involves a handson approach, providing guides for developing and manufacturing open source hardware. Although many books have been published on specific pieces of open source hardware, to date there has not been a book published on the community or the steps to work all the way through designing and manufacturing a piece of open source hardware. There has been a burst of activity around making and doityourself (DIY) projects, but the DIY and maker movements are growing to a new stage, wanting to produce on larger scales and move projects to products. If you have been hacking on some hardware in your basement and want to start building multiples of it and selling them on your website as open source, this book is for you.

This book covers both the theoretical side of open source hardware and the practices and methods necessary to create a piece of open source hardware. It is intended to be a holistic experience, moving from developing to manufacturing of open source hardware, while explaining the benefits, standards, and incentives found at the various stages of this process. This book includes beginner to intermediatelevel technical concepts and is coupled with an open source hardware kit that can be purchased separately to foster experimentation.

The intended audience of this book includes people from a multitude of fields, all of whom are interested in creating open source hardware and would like a guide for the theory, standards, and handson advice. Individuals and companies, large and small, that are already interested in the DIY and maker movement, but still need some help on how to create, document, and think about licensing, manufacturing, and selling open source hardware will also benefit from this book.

I chose not to selfpublish for a number of reasons. The major one, however, was that without a publisher inviting me to write a book on this topic, the thought would have never occurred to me. My publisher is also well known in the open source software community for publishing portions of books with open source licenses, so this book is partially open source, too! The chapters written under a Creative Commons license are listed on the copyright page.