Abstract
Open source hardware is increasingly becoming popular within the makers community, and many organizations are finding ways to leverage the new phenomenon. Open source processes are fundamentally different because they are driven by evolutionary processes, as compared to traditional hierarchical design processes. Hence, a critical driving factor for their success is the ability to use and to make improvements and modifications over existing designs. Making modifications in simple products, where the changes in one aspect of the product do not propagate to other aspects, is relatively easier than in complex products. Currently, such modifications are difficult to perform on complex hardware products, thereby limiting the evolution of open source hardware products. In this chapter, we discuss some of these technological and knowledge barriers faced by the open hardware community in modifying and validating open hardware products. The discussion is guided by an illustrative example of an open source 3D printer.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Open Source Hardware Association. [Online]. Available: http://www.oshwa.org/definition/
J. Oxer and H. Blemings, Practical Arduino Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware. APress, New York, 2009.
[Online]. Available: http://www.theoscarproject.org/
[Online]. Available: http://openprosthetics.org/
M. E. Conway, “How do committees invent,” Datamation, vol. 14(5), pp. 28–31, 1968.
E. von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press, 2005.
S. Butler, Erewhon. Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1906, 1872.
J. von Neumann, The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. (ed. A. W. Burks),. University of Illinois Press, 1966.
R. Jones, P. Haufe, E. Sells, P. Iravani, V. Olliver, C. Palmer, and A. Bowyer, “Reprap-the replicating rapid prototyper,” Robotica, vol. 29, pp. 177–191, 2011.
[Online]. Available: www.reprap.org
Planet reprap. [Online]. Available: http://planet.arcol.hu/
reprap.org. [Online]. Available: http://forums.reprap.org/
GitHub. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/
GitHub. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/reprap
Thingiverse. [Online]. Available: www.thingiverse.com/
Forbes. [Online]. Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/11/21/insidethingiverse-the-radically-open-website-powering-the-3d-printing-movement/
Global News Wire. [Online]. Available: http://globenewswire.com/newsrelease/2012/12/04/509514/10014606/en/MakerBot-Announces-New-Collections-Featureas-Phase-Two-in-Thingiverse-Evolution.html
reprap.org. [Online]. Available: http://reprap.org/wiki/Huxley
reprap.org. [Online]. Available: http://reprap.org/wiki/
Source Forge. [Online]. Available: http://sourceforge.net/projects/alliancecad/
Source Forge. [Online]. Available: http://www.geda-project.org/
upverter. [Online]. Available: https://angel.co/upverter
upverter. [Online]. Available: https://upverter.com/vision/
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Science Foundation through NSF CMMI grants 1201114 and 1265622.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yanamandram, V.M.K., Panchal, J.H. (2014). Evaluating the Level of Openness in Open Source Hardware. In: Schaefer, D. (eds) Product Development in the Socio-sphere. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07404-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07404-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07403-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07404-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)