Open Source Hardware
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
The gadget-lust I’ve been experiencing when I’ve been seeing iPhone 3G’s in the wild has been difficult to control, but the lack of any halfway reasonable data plan from any of the 3 networks has helped me to stop myself from committing to it for 24 months. I’ve been following the development of the OpenMoko open source handset movement for a while now. While the form factor isn’t quite as nice as the iPhone, its heavier and deeper than Apple’s release, the fact that all the hardware and software is open source is a significant selling point. I’ve been reading about the hoops that Apple has been making developers jump through in order to get their apps on the iPhone and it doesn’t sound appealing.
I just read about an effort by Techcrunch to create the OpenMoko equivalent of web tablet.
Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.
I like this trend towards open source hardware. While it might take a while to reach the mainstream, as it matures it should get hardware manufacturers to consider whether it is cheaper to design a gadget from scratch or comply with the open standards.