Encouraging Collaboration

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Snial
 
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Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2018 7:58 am

Encouraging Collaboration

Post by Snial »

Hi folks,

A while back I developed the DIY SBC computer kit FIGnition (2011 - that's a long time). The firmware is currently available as open-source, along with the PCB design as a human-readable Mac OS X Osmond X file and the BOM, help and build guidelines are available freely online:

https://github.com/Snial/FIGnition

https://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition

I am not sure that this is enough to properly qualify it as OSHW, but that was (is) the intention.

Later I developed a peripheral called FIGkeys which interfaces to a PS/2 keyboard and translates it into FIGnition keypad scan codes. It fits on an ATTINY24 and the hardware is fairly minimal. I sold FIGkeys for £9.50 (+P&P), which gave me the traditional Maker markup of 2.3x (1.6x 1.4).

The problem I've had is when people offer to produce PCBs, but almost exclusively they then want to sell their PCBs for free. From my perspective it means that I won't be able to produce products in the future, because there's no way to reclaim the investment of my initial effort.

Isn't this a problem faced by many OSHW developers?

-best regards from Julz

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