Open Hardware
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Halamka: Google Glass - the Details
I’m now able to publicly write about the work that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has been doing with stealthy start up, Wearable Intelligence. We’ve been working over the past 4 months on pilots that I believe will improve the safety, quality and efficiency of patient care through the integration of wearable technology such as Google Glass in the hospital environment. Read More »
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Hardware Startups: Don't Be Scared, Share!
A few days ago, I received an email that was full of mystery. It was short but intriguing. Jonathan, its author, was telling me about a great product he was working on. He needed advice on how to get started and take his prototype to the next stage.
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How Citizens Become Scientists with Open Hardware
Eymund Diegel, a research coordinator for Gowanus Canal Conservancy, shares this tidbit during the first clip of the new Open Source Stories documentary, "The Science of Collective Discovery." He's setting out in a canoe on an inner-city canal that is polluted and struggling to get the help it needs. That's the theme of citizen science it seems: people and places in need who are not getting the help and resources they deserve taking matters into their own hands. Why are they not getting the help they need in the first place? The reason is shockingly simple yet a typical problem: Where's the evidence?
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How to Contribute to Open Source Healthcare Projects for COVID-19
Many of those that are familiar with the maker movement, including me, believe there is a significant opportunity to apply open source design principles and mass-scale collaborative distributed manufacturing technologies (like open source 3D printing) to at least partially overcome medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic...Many people agree there is enormous potential with the approach despite the challenges and have started to self-organize to develop open source hardware to fight COVID-19. The largest group is Project Open Air. They are a group of "Helpful Engineers" who have congregated to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic response by developing both open source hardware and open source software. The Helpful Engineers are working on medical devices such as open source ventilators, to create a solution that can be quickly reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. Read More »
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How to Open Source Your Academic Work in 7 Steps
Open source technology and academia are the perfect match. Find out how to meet tenure requirements while benefiting the whole community. Academic work fits nicely into the open source ethos: The higher the value of what you give away, the greater your academic prestige and earnings. Professors accomplish this by sharing their best ideas for free in journal articles in peer-reviewed literature. This is our currency, without a strong publishing record not only would our ability to progress in our careers degrade, but even our jobs could be lost (and the ability to get any other job). The following seven steps provide the best practices for making an academic's work open source...
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Intel's first 'open-source PC' on sale for $199
Intel has shipped its first “open-source PC,” a bare-bones computer aimed at software developers building x86 applications and hobbyists looking to construct their own computer. Read More »
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LittleBits' Ayah Bdeir: Making Hardware As Hackable As Code
Long before she became the CEO of a tech company, Ayah Bdeir was an electronic artist whose installations shared messages about Arab identity. "Random Search" is an undergarment that records and shares the experience of an airport patdown. "Les Années Lumière," or "The Years of Light," visualizes three years of explosions in Lebanon with blinking LED lights on a map.
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Mainstream Academia Embraces Open Source Hardware
Twenty years ago, even staunch proponents of free and open source software like Richard Stallman questioned the social imperative for free hardware designs. Academics had barely started to consider the concept; the number of papers coming out annually on the topic were less than could be counted on someone's fingers. Not anymore! Not only has the ethical authority of Stallman embraced free hardware and free hardware design, but so has the academic community. Consider the graph below, which shows the number of articles on open source hardware indexed by Google Scholar each year from 2000 to 2017. In the last 17 years, the concept of open source hardware has erupted in ivory towers throughout the world. Now more than 1,000 articles are written on the topic every year.
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Makers are the new industrial revolution
Following up on the recent review of the Maker's Manifesto, I ran across the book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Anderson is a former Editor in Chief of Wired and no stranger to the economic paradoxes of peer-production and open source. He has written about both in previous books The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Read More »
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Man Compares His $42k Prosthetic Hand to a $50 3D Printed Cyborg Beast
Over the last several months, some of the more inspiring stories around 3D printing have had to do with the printing of prosthetic devices, particularly hands. From war torn Sudan, where 3D printing is making the lives of hundreds of injured children and young adults easier, to people here in the United States, who are saving significant amounts of money by 3D printing their own prosthetics, these stories certainly are eye openers...
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Michigan Tech Engineering Team Joins Open Source Ventilator Movement
As COVID-19 continues to spread, the research community is looking for solutions. In addition to work on vaccines and medicine, medical technology is needed. In severe cases of COVID-19, the disease attacks the respiratory system, and one of the major bottlenecks in treatment is having enough ventilators. The open-source hardware community wants to change that. Joshua Pearce...an open-source hardware expert and co-editor-in-chief of HardwareX [explained] that 3D-printed lab hardware and other open-source tech can be cost-effective and encourages design improvement. "Even complex medical devices are not outside the realm of possibility anymore."
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New Open Source Program Director Supports Students' Passions at the Rochester Institute of Technology
The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is well-known for its work in open source software through FOSS@MAGIC. In April 2014, RIT started to offer a minor in free and open source software. Students work on several different open source projects in their GitHub organization. One of the courses in the minor, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development, has students work with the One Laptop per Child XO laptops. Students create games that help teach New York and Massachusetts fourth grade math curriculum. Dan Schneiderman is the new head of the FOSS@MAGIC program at RIT...
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Not Impossible Labs’ Award-Winning ‘Project Daniel’ Celebrates One-Year Anniversary
Not Impossible Labs’ Award-Winning ‘Project Daniel’ Celebrates One-Year Anniversary...Ebeling remarks, “The thing I'm most excited about is this has awoken the realization that helping people gain access to solutions is not limited to big corporations and institutions. If we can continue to show people that technology is not this foreign, inaccessible thing, but is something that is very real and can help individuals in their worlds, then Project Daniel is just the first fuse lit for the many ideas to come.”
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OKFest in Finland to Study Benefits of Open Knowledge and Open Development
The Open Knowledge Festival (OKFest) happens this September 17-22 in Helsinki, Finland with the theme Open Knowledge in Action. OKFest will explore the benefits of opening up knowledge and information, look at the ecosystems of organisations that can benefit from openness, and discuss the impact that more transparency can have in our societies. OKFest will run 13 key Topic Streams, one of which will focus on the topic of ‘Open Development’.
Open Is the Solution to Improving 21st Century Education
Much of the Internet runs Linux and open source software, yet in most of our schools—whether PK-12 or higher education—Linux and open source software are given short shrift. Linux has made serious inroads on hand-held devices, the desktop, and the Internet of things (IoT) that use platforms such as Raspberry Pi, Galileo, and Arduino. Despite this astounding growth, a relatively small number of secondary and post-secondary schools offer technology training that prepares students for increasingly in-demand technical skills. The growth of the maker movement and the concurrent interest in STEM skills, which include coding and ethical hacking, may provide a much-needed impetus to change this trend. The problem for most schools is finding the mentors and exemplars of this paradigm...
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