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Olimex
Senior Member

Joined: 02/10/2011
Location: Bulgaria
Posts: 226

Posted: 01:37pm 04 Nov 2011

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As this obviously is in the interest to many peoples here I think it may be appropiate to set one separate topic where we can discuss further if necessary.

I will confess that I'm in the open source field for not so long, but I already am in love with it.

So let me put few words how do I see things.

I have Speech for Open Source Hardware this Saturday at http://www.openfest.org which is the annual Open Source Event here in Bulgaria, so I did my home work and it's easy :)

My fist contact with Open Source is back in 2003 when I was contacted by group of peoples who worked on the OpenEEG project http://openeeg.sourceforge.net
They were group of engineers all around the world (Germany, Sweden, Australia, USA) whos goal was to build affordable EEG bio-feedback machine.

Some of the OpenEEG users were peoples with relatives in coma after car accedents, other were practicing East Material Arts and were unsure if they meditate correctly, so they wanted to have tool which to allow monitoring of the brain activity.
The commercial solution EEGs starts at EUR 50 000 and no wonder as they are subject to extensive testing for medical appliances which cost millions just to complete.
This project was setup few years before and the peopels were good engineers every one in his field but couldnt make this project alone, one was briliant analogue engineer, the other PC software specialist, the third was designing PCBs etc.
To make long story short they build together EEG which have same or exceed the parameters of the commercial EEG but had no any certification on it and they were using it for personal home use. The complete EEG assembled, tested, calibrated cost EUR 125 :-)
We helped with the PCB production and the board assembly. This was my first encounter with the power of the shared knowledge.

Second contact with Open source project was the OpenOCD, I've been contacted by Dominic Rath - student in German university which diploma theses was ... open source JTAG debugger, at that time good JTAG was in price range EUR 1000 - 10 000.
It's enormous amount of work to support all the ARM cores and derivates pipelining, cache shemes etc. first I though he is a bit crazy :) but he made support for ARM7 at that time.
First OpenOCD was pretty elementary, it had lot of bugs etc, but ... we build the hardware for and it cost EUR 40 so lot of students and beginners were attracted to it. Few years later it covers more ARM cores than any commercial tool on the market :-) there are tenths of peoples who contribute regulary and companies like Nokia and Siemens use it in their daily work, this speaks alone how powerful tool OpenOCD become!

I think also Open Source have it's philosophical roots - human being always want to prove himself that he is here and lives for some purpose and wants something to be left after it's gone.

I'm biker and love to travel with my bike, near Plovdiv where I live there are the Rhodopi Mouontains with beatiful nature, when you travel on the road you see hundreds of water-wells made with stones so the traveler can stop-by, take rest and drink some water if he is dursty.
On each well is written "this was built in year 1756 (or whatever) by Mr. Somebody for the community" - this is the way Mr. Somebody wanted to left something after him.
So to build something without money just for the community is not new idea :-)

Open Source project is just one of these thing you can left after you.

Another motive peoples to do Open Source is the power to share your knowledge and to learn from the other too, I read somewhere: if we both have by one apple and exchange them we will both still have by one apple, if we have by one idea and share them we both will have two ideas, and this is very true.

I've been contacted recently from guy from Switzerland who is Cook, he collects receipts all around the world and even put and web social network where peoples share cooking receipts.
What he asked was if we can build some PCBs for his idea to create cooking automat, which takes the receipts from the web, and control oven with temperature, time algorithms so every time you got same cooking result.
As being cook he knew nothing in electronics but knowing a lot of how to make the cooking he had an idea, which he couldn't implement alone, he found other enhusiasts wich knowledge of electronics, one made the thermocouple part, another digital controller part.
All this was done with Arduino. And the final product is not finish yet, but it will become something unique, as one pure electronic engineer would never complete this alone as have not the cooking knowledge, neither the Cook can complete due to the absence of electronics knowledge.
But they all together can create something unique which wouldn't be possible without the open source spirit.

I can write a lot more, but work is waiting me :)

Best regards
Tsvetan

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