open source designs

See the following -

A 3D printed Hand Brings The Crowd To Their Feet

Peregrine Hawthorn | OpenSource.com | March 18, 2014

Earlier this year, I shared my story about open source designs and my 3D printed prosthetic hand to a room of 4,600+ at Intel’s Annual International Sales Conference in Las Vegas. I joined Jon Schull on stage, the founder of e-NABLE, an online group dedicated to open source 3D printable assistive devices.

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Hacking the Farm with Low-Cost, Open Source Tool Designs

After starting his own farm in Missouri, Marcin Jakubowski quickly discovered it's an expensive business. The tools he needed to start and maintain a sustainable farm didn't exist, so he set out to design them himself. Marcin published a collection of his open source designs, called the Global Village Construction Set, to the Open Source Ecology wiki. Soon, just as in open source software, others from around the world began to collaborate with him in designing these new machines. According to the wiki, "Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that enables fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts...

Open Human Augmentation Focus of Penguicon 2015 Conference

The Penguicon 2015 theme is human augmentation. The lines between science fiction and reality are growing thinner because of bright minds and innovators who focus on improving people’s lives. For instance, prosthetics that once cost thousands of dollars can be now printed with open source designs for less than a lunch for four at a decent restaurant. We’re even controlling them with impulses from our brains! People are either wearing devices that make them more powerful, efficient, or aware—or implanting tech directly into their bodies. As we become more like machines, we’ll explore some of those emerging technologies and talk to people who are actively developing them, like e-NABLE...

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The Story of Ultimaker: 3D Printers with Open Source DNA

Today we're seeing open hardware projects and businesses succeed for the first time in history. Why, and what do they look like? The story of the Ultimaker and its user community proves that being open is in fact sustainable and may even go a step further to say that that sharing and collaboration are genuine routes to innovation. Let's go back several years to a makerspace in Utrecht, a big city in the Netherlands. The founders of Ultimaker, a premium 3D printer manufacturer, were inspired by the potential of 3D printing, and experimenting with the open source designs of the RepRap project...

Using 3D Printers to Tackle Gaza's Medical Shortages

Mersiha Gadzo | Aljazeera | September 5, 2017

The stethoscope, a staple device in modern medicine, is a luxury item in Gaza. At Gaza's largest hospital, al-Shifa, there are only one or two stethoscopes in each department; doctors left without one resort to pressing their ears against patients' chests to diagnose an illness. "That would be the best-case scenario," Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani told Al Jazeera. "If someone's full of blood, most doctors aren't going to put their ears to the chest. So, doctors are making decisions without that piece of information."...

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Why Now Is A Great Time To Consider A Career In Open Source Hardware

Twenty years or so ago, almost no one even knew what open source hardware was, let alone planned a career around it. In 2000, for example, out of the more than 2 million academic papers published that year in the entire world, only seven articles even mentioned "open source hardware" at all. When I first wrote Open-Source Lab, I'd collected every example (only a few dozen) and could easily keep up and read every open hardware article that got published to post them on a wiki. I am happy to report that is no longer physically possible. There have already been over 1,500 articles that discuss "open source hardware" this year, and I am sure many more will be out by year's end. Open source hardware is now a field of its own, with a few journals dedicated to it specifically (for example, HardwareX and the Journal of Open Hardware). In a wide range of fields, dozens of traditional journals now routinely cover the latest open hardware developments.