I just got back from a transformational weekend with some of the coolest and most influential hackers I have ever had the pleasure to meet. It was an event call Sketching in Hardware, and I’m incredibly honoured to have been invited.
For starters, you probably want to know what Sketching is, so I’m going to steal Mike’s words:
“The sixth annual summit on the design and use of physical computing toolkits. Attendance by invitation only. Presentations by every attendee. Sketching is a three-day meeting to discuss tools for physical computing prototyping: how to make them, how to make them better, how to use them, and how to teach with them.”
Cool right?!?!
For Upverter, Sketching presented itself as a tremendous opportunity to start a dialogue on what we have been working on, what collaboration on hardware means, what answers we think we have and the questions we still have yet to figure out. There will probably be more to come on this with the upcoming Open Source Hardware Summit too…
But in the meantime I’m going to ask some questions:
* Why are there no large or distributed open source hardware projects?
* What does collaborating on a hardware project mean?
* How important is ownership?
* What is the most painful part of your design workflow?
* Could it be crowd-sourced?
If you have an opinion on any of these, let me know… I’ll buy you a beer and we can chat about it!
It’s our mission to someday have answers for as many of these questions as makes sense. We want to make Hardware easier and faster to develop. We want to see people sharing and working together, especially on the non-core bits. We think we are started on the right path, but we are also humble enough to know nothing good comes from building without feedback. So speak up, and help us build the tools of tomorrow.
For more info see my presentation below…
Upverter Blog 